


Ryswyck

by linman



Category: Original Work
Genre: Multi, Original project
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-08-10
Updated: 2013-07-16
Packaged: 2017-11-11 21:03:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/482872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linman/pseuds/linman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Opening chapters for my current original novel-length project, what I'm calling my exercise in id-indulgence. Posted as a teaser to encourage me to work.</p><p>Premise:  A military academy in an embattled nation has a reputation for turning out brilliant officers whose skill in fighting is exceeded only by their devotion to the law of courtesy.  But two of its elite students begin to uncover secrets that may destroy its beloved founder and threaten the academy itself.  Soon they find themselves drawn not only into the looming threat of scandal, but into the overwhelming prospect of war, which will put their skill, their courtesy, and their friendship to the ultimate test.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

Speir knuckled sweat and blood out of her eye and took advantage of the moment’s space to breathe deeply. Across the arena Stevens was brushing sawdust off his flanks and regaining his habitual grin. She grinned back, half to herself.

Behind and around, above the mirrored panels of the recessed combat pit, the air was full of shouts of encouragement. “Go on, Speir,” someone’s voice crowed topmost, probably Andera, sounded like him— “get him again!” People liked to see Stevens get knocked down in open-hand once or twice at least before he walked away with the victory in his meaty fist. Nobody actually ever won a match with Stevens, but Speir was determined to take a good crack at it.

He looked ready, and she had her breath back. She circled in close, looking for the right moment to go in, but he moved first, heavy but quick. Barely dodging a savage blow, Speir grabbed for a hold and twisted to drive her knee into the back of his; he eeled out of reach and slung her reeling out of the center square. The momentum sent her right to the polished steel panels, and she used their spring-backed resilience to propel herself back to him, savoring the open joy of combat. She got in one quick blow to his chin before having to duck again; unfortunately, what should have rolled him sidewise only gave him a momentary jerk, and he caught her as she tried to flank him. In the act of tossing her, his hand caught in her headguard and pulled it free; her hair spilled out of its knot, and momentarily blinded her as she fell.

She struggled to her feet, aware of the buffoonery of her position, and as she frantically wiped the strands from her face to meet his following stroke, she heard the shrill cut of the judge’s whistle.

They both turned at once to the platform chair, where Captain Marag sat observing. The tumult of voices in the arena damped down.

“Fault to Stevens,” he said. “Round to Speir.”

Stevens said: “What’s the judgment?”

“If you deny taking pleasure in Speir’s embarrassment, then the fault is arbitrary,” Marag said.

An arbitrary fault was a hazard of the arena, but instead of accepting it as such, Stevens bowed to her briefly, closed hand over heart. “All’s well,” Speir answered him. Stevens’s battle-grin returned, and he saluted her for the round, his hand flicking sharply to his forehead, away and down. He waited for her to re-secure her hair under her headguard, and then the whistle cut the air again and battle was rejoined.

In which Speir took an immediate slug to the chest that bowled her over almost twice. She scrambled, winded and dizzy, to her feet, avoided another blow, found and lost a hold, landed an elbow to Stevens’s flank, got clear of him, lurched into speed again and placed another good punch, received one in return that would have knocked her over if she hadn’t spun at the exquisite point of gravity, ducked under his arm again, drove for his midriff and was stymied by his greater reach, took another blow and rolled in the sawdust, got up weaving, and was unsurprised when the whistle blew and the round was called for Stevens.

She snapped him a sharp salute. 

“What kind of exit do you want?” he asked her, solicitously.

“Horizontal,” she said.

“You sure?”

“I’ll make you work for it, too,” she said, and he grinned a real grin this time.

“So be it,” Stevens said, and the whistle blew.

It wasn’t good form at the Academy to pull punches, but Stevens had developed a distaste for producing regular carnage, and as long as he gave people a decent challenge, most people were willing in courtesy to let him break form. But as far as Speir was concerned, the third round was no place for that.

One good blow was all she wanted; just one would do. She avoided closing with him for the first minutes, reading him quickly, ducking his full-strength swings, hearing the cacophony of her fellows from the benches. At last he landed one that sent her sprawling, a reel of broken light behind her eyes, and waited politely for her to rock slowly, half-blind, to her feet. Speir shook off the pain and came back to center. One good blow. She masked her intent as she approached, and was gratified to see him caught off guard by her sudden left—he actually sat down for a split second before rolling again to his feet and returning to her. Her duck wasn’t quite fast enough.

Speir was a little slower getting up this time; again he waited. She got knocked down twice more without getting in a second blow, and the noise in the arena rose to a roar to match the roar of pain in her senses.

Once more. She launched herself toward him.

The next thing she knew, she was on her back, the scent of sawdust tickling her nostrils, and a meaty hand was holding her head steady. “Don’t move,” Stevens warned her, “till the scan’s done.”

After two tries she was able to form words. “How long was I out?”

“’Bout two minutes.”

“Ah. They call it yet?”

“If you concede.”

From her supine position, Speir dragged up her hand and gave him a salute as snappy as she could make it, which wasn’t very, because she was groggy and the medics were in the way. Stevens stood up, the watery sun from the dome overhead making an aureole around his large head and shoulders, and saluted her back as victor of the match.

“Thank you,” Speir breathed, too weary to make the gesture, and the medics hoisted her on the backboard and carried her out to a storm of cheers.

*

“That…,” said Lord Thornhill, “was rather brutal.”

They were sitting on the observation platform of the arena reserved for the headmaster and his guests, watching the cadets and junior and senior officers make their way from the benches to go about their duties. General Barklay’s eyes were on Stevens, who had just made his salute to Barklay and exited the combat pit after Speir’s horizontal recession, and he almost missed what Thornhill had said. Almost; he’d been expecting something of the sort.

“Worse happens in war,” Barklay pointed out.

“Indeed,” sighed Lord Frasera. She had had her turn in the sub-Council rotation directing the armed forces of Ilona, and had served in the army in her youth; Barklay thought her too young to have seen the war when it was on their home soil, but it didn’t mean she had seen nothing at all; she was only a little younger than he, after all.

“Well,” Barklay said, “now that the match is concluded, shall I show you the grounds?”

“Please,” Thornhill said, and they got up to make their own way out of the arena and the honeycomb complex that surrounded it, busy with the work of his students, training, tidying, passing them with cheerful and respectful greetings in the corridors en route to duties elsewhere.

Frasera waited till Barklay had finished one such exchange with a young cadet before asking a question. “General,” she said when they were on their way again, “I heard the judge give a call which I am not familiar with; it must be particular to Ryswyck. What is an arbitrary fault?”

“Just what it sounds like,” Barklay said with a sidelong half-grin, and Lord Frasera gave a delicate snort. “The judges of a match,” he elaborated, “are free to award an arbitrary fault if they feel things are going too much one way, or if they wish to test the balance of one of the combatants. Its usual effect is to galvanize both combatants in the next round. Sometimes it’s a sharp reminder of courtesy, as you saw today.”

“But to arbitrarily influence the outcome of a match?” Thornhill said. “Surely it’s better for the combatants to earn their victory cleanly.”

Barklay shook his head, and they emerged from the arena into the broad portico that surrounded the building. From here they had a view across the wide quadrangle of the low barracks and grey-quarried offices and classroom blocks of Ryswyck Academy, scaffolded in at the edges by the covered walkways that shielded them from the rains.

“In Ryswyckian combat, as in life,” Barklay said, “one must learn to accept unfair reversals without complaint. The sooner one can detach one’s pride from one’s unquestioned success, the better.” Thornhill looked appalled, and Barklay added: “I will say that most judges consider it unsporting to decide the end result with an arbitrary fault. It’s usually used to stir things up a bit.”

“As we saw,” Frasera said.

“Quite. Allow me to show you to the classroom block. This way.” Had he been alone, Barklay would have cut across the green-wet quad without regard for the light rain that was falling, but it would be uncharitable to ask the discomfort of his guests. Not to mention impolitic. Barklay led them round to the stone-paved walkway that led down and around the edge of the cadet barracks.

“How are the matches made up?” Frasera asked him. The comment on the mismatch between Speir and Stevens was left unspoken, but Barklay heard it clearly anyway.

“Mainly by scheduling considerations,” Barklay said. “Matches are held three times a week, and ideally everyone will arrive in the arena well-rested and recovered from their last bout, so they are spaced as expeditiously as possible. The combatants agree beforehand on the format; Speir and Stevens, as you saw, both favor open-hand combat, but some prefer the baton. Foils are out of favor in this generation, I notice; my students seem to think they can get more direct contact with the other formats. I haven’t removed it from the training modules, though. First- and second-year cadets are scheduled together; junior officers are scheduled together; and sometimes a senior officer will step down from the judge’s platform and fill in a place in their schedule.”

“I heard,” Thornhill said, “that the students challenge each other to duels. Is that not so?”

_And where did you hear that, I wonder?_ Barklay thought. He had a shrewd idea who had been causing Thornhill to worry about this school, and if he was right, there was no point losing his serenity. “No combat outside the arena,” he said. “No individual sparring appointments except with permission. Students are allowed to request a match, which is granted on the merits of the request.”

“And a personal conflict is not a proper merit?” said Frasera.

“Oh, no,” Barklay said, “personal conflicts are acceptable merits. Saves me some time in arbitration.” _That_ was going to make Thornhill bridle.

Thornhill bridled. “But how can you possibly reconcile two people by having one of them beat the other senseless?”

“A question we could just as well ask about the war itself,” Frasera murmured, saving Barklay the trouble.

“I’m talking about the rule of law.” Thornhill glared at her, and then at Barklay, as if he had made her say it.

“Ah, the rule of law,” Barklay said calmly, pausing at the recessed doors of the cadet barracks. “This is where the cadets are quartered, two to a room. Junior officers are the next building over; they have the privilege of their own rooms and showers. Senior officers and guests are quartered on the other side, as you saw when you arrived. The rule of law is very simple here, Lord Thornhill. There is only one law: the law of courtesy. Everything that happens at Ryswyck flows from that one law. A student learns that maintaining discipline, working at his course of study, fulfilling her duties, facing another in the arena—all of these are done to honor the humanity of the people with whom we are living. A student here may sooner put his opponent in hospital than speak to him in contempt. I’ve expelled a student for a single insult uttered in my hearing.” Barklay turned and cast his gaze from the dome of the arena to the tower beyond the classroom plant; his companions followed the invitation of his glance. “I started this Academy because I wished to see a place where courtesy is not just surface commerce but a way of life. The brutal realities of war must not take away from us our souls.”

He had said such things many times before, to many such visitors, and had ceased to expect their eyes to light as his students’ did. Thornhill’s eyes did not light, but he looked troubled, which was a better sign than complacent agreement, as if Barklay were speaking platitudes.

They weren’t platitudes, to Barklay. They were lifelines.

Frasera had had enough of Thornhill’s inquisition. “Your students certainly seem to take on that ethos with alacrity. How are their studies laid out, General Barklay?”

They resumed their walk up the barracks side of the quad. “Cadets take up study either for the army or the navy. Besides the principles of direct combat, they learn practical cartography, supply management, tactics and strategy, and weapons systems—the latter in its unclassified form, of course. If they win a place in the junior officer corps for their third year, they are expected to help teach the foregoing, and specialize in a course of their own choosing, which my rotation of senior officers teaches them.”

“Yes, I’m aware of the rotation arrangement from our end,” Frasera said. “I suppose it’s alumni of Ryswyck that you’d want judging matches, however.”

“Well, yes,” Barklay said. “Let’s go inside here; this will take us into the school proper.”

They entered, along with a few cadets hurrying to the last class meeting of the day before the tower bell. As they reached the crossing, they met Speir coming back from the junior officers’ block, now showered and neatly dressed in her informal greys, the insignia on her epaulets bright and new. Despite a certain paleness and a bruised contusion over her eyebrow (neatly mended with a small sticking bandage), she looked balanced and cheerful, as well she should.

“Well, Lieutenant,” Barklay hailed her, “may I congratulate you on a good match.”

“Thank you, sir,” Speir said, standing straight and saluting him smartly, as she’d not been able to do in the arena. He nodded back.

“On your way to supper?” he asked.

“No, sir. Junior officers’ meeting.”

“Oh, yes, I’d forgotten that was today. Your first?”

“Yes, sir.” Speir grinned suddenly.

“My lords,” Barklay said to his companions, “allow me to make known to you Lieutenant Stephanie Leam Speir, our newest addition to the junior officer corps and a formidable force in the arena—and wherever else she happens to be. Lieutenant Speir, may I present Lords Thornhill and Frasera, from the sub-Council, here on a short visit.”

Speir spread her hand on her breast and inclined her head: she had grown up in the capital, Barklay recalled, and knew the niceties.

“Any relation to the submarine commander of beloved memory?” Thornhill said, jovially. Barklay wanted to kick him.

“Yes, my lord,” Speir said. “She was my mother.”

“Ah!” _I bet he wasn’t expecting_ that, Barklay thought. But Thornhill recovered almost at once. “And you’re following her footsteps into the navy?” he pursued.

“No, my lord. It’s the army for me.” Speir smiled at him, her own firm kindness and Ryswyckian courtesy blended, impossible to patronize. Yes, she was going to justify her promotion very quickly indeed, Barklay thought.

“In which she will do very well,” Barklay said. “Well, we won’t keep you, Lieutenant.”

Speir’s glance flicked to him, amused. “Thank you, sir. A pleasure to meet you, my lords.”

The visitors nodded back, and Barklay led them on their way as Speir disappeared.

“She looks almost none the worse,” Thornhill said, glancing in wonder over his shoulder.

“I suppose if you’re going to face Lieutenant Stevens you’d better be resilient,” Frasera said dryly.

“Quite.” Barklay allowed himself a brief grin. “We are about to pass the administrative wing. This is where my offices and quarters are, as well as the briefing rooms which are used whenever post commanders hold council here. The data centers are down that corridor, and updates are coordinated through the tower several times a day—ah, Lieutenant Douglas,” Barklay said, speaking to a junior officer who had just emerged from an office. “I was just speaking of communications. When you’ve finished with the meeting and had your supper, will you take a dispatch to General Inslee?”

“Yes, sir,” Douglas said. “Shall I wait for his answer, or should I get an open line to your com-deck?”

“Wait for his answer and bring it back to me,” Barklay said. “Thank you, Douglas.”

Douglas saluted him, nodded respectfully to the lords, and moved quietly past them.

“Douglas,” Barklay mentioned, “once threw Stevens with the baton, and almost won the match. He’s one of my best officers. If we take this left, we’ll arrive at the mess hall. If you are so inclined, I could give you supper before you go. And in fact, it is very little trouble to arrange for you to stay in the guest house for the night; allow me to offer it to you.” The offer was sincere, but he would be just as happy if they refused it.

Thornhill and Frasera glanced at one another. “I think we’ll keep to our original plan,” Frasera said, “but I wouldn’t mind getting a bite to eat.”

“Then let us go in to supper,” Barklay said.

He ushered them forward with a gracious gesture, and they continued on, their well-heeled footsteps echoing down the stone-girt hall.

*

“And I need one more person to fill the crew that’s cleaning out the stables at the end of this week,” Cameron said.

“I’ll do it.”

“Thank you, Stevens, that is much appreciated.” Cameron made a small mark with her stylus on the tablet. “There, that covers the unattached duties. Now, for the rotations—you’ll be pleased to hear that we’ve got permission to form another duty rota.” There was a murmur of pleased comment. “It means more work for individuals, of course, but it should make scheduling easier. Dearmer is projecting up the proposed schedule.” Dearmer obligingly fiddled with the controls, and the projection popped up. People began shuffling, preparing to write down their own schedule. Douglas, who headed a rota and had already seen the proposed schedule, remained still.

“Now, I’ve spoken with all the rota captains and they have checked on people’s personal duty schedules, so there should be a minimum of problems.” Cameron gave a resigned little sigh; a minimum of problems didn’t necessarily translate to a minimum of questions and requests for changes, Douglas knew. “Please consult with me after the meeting if there is something you absolutely have to have changed. Speir, I’ve added you to E Rota. Is that all right?”

“Yes, it’s fine,” Speir said.

“Good. Now—”

“Well, now,” said Ahrens, “you’ve got me on both A Rota and E Rota. Are you trying to keep me out of trouble?”

It was true. The room broke into snickers, and Cameron smiled ruefully. “My fault, Ahrens,” she said, briefly touching her closed hand to her breast. “Thank you for catching that.”

“I think the other rota captains should bear some of that fault,” Douglas said dryly. “I didn’t catch it either.” The other rota captains murmured agreement.

“All’s well,” Ahrens said. “But may I just have one set of duties?”

“Yes,” Cameron said. “Pick which.”

“E Rota is better for me.”

“E Rota it is. By the way, this is the master schedule; this week’s schedule starts everyone at the fourth rotation. So E Rota, you’re on communications this week, not training, A Rota is on classroom, B is on training, C is on kitchen, D is on—what was it?—supply and waste. Now, I’ve got a gap on A Rota….”

“I can take it,” Speir said.

“Excellent. Douglas will get you your pass-keys for the week. Douglas, you’re presiding over next month’s meeting….”

“Yes…,” Douglas said.

“And you promised you would straighten up the minute reports for us.”

“So I did,” he sighed. “Yes. Give me the minute-book and I’ll get to work on it before the next meeting.”

“Dearmer, the minute-book goes to Douglas after the meeting. Thank you, and thank you, Douglas. Now—”

Cameron always ran a meeting like a shepherd working a skittish flock through a gate, marshalling all her sheepdogs to push them through before they decided to break. There were worse ways to run a meeting, and Douglas amused himself contentedly with a picture of Cameron in a heavy hooded smock and thigh-boots, gnawing on a pipe and glaring at the sheep as they passed through.

The business of the meeting concluded with a plan for the month’s recreation activities and an enthusiastic scrutiny of the match schedule. It broke up in a flurry of exchanges between the rota captains and their teams, and the junior officers spilled out of the meeting room to hurry and get supper before the mess hall closed. Douglas wasn’t very hungry, but he knew he wouldn’t have time for a snack later, so he went down and asked the cadet at the line for just a cup of stew and a barley roll, and took it to a corner to eat quickly.

The mess hall had been quiet after the earlier passage of most of the cadets, but the junior officers livened it up a bit. A few benches away he saw Speir looking palely down at her plate of stew as if she’d rather fight it than eat it; Stevens plopped himself down across from her, and a few minutes later was joined by several others who were clearly interested in the topic of the afternoon’s match. If Douglas hadn’t had his other duties, he would have stirred himself to join them. He scraped up the last few bites of stew, and took his tray to the hatch.

Barklay wasn’t in his office, but the outer office opened to Douglas’s pass-key, and a sealed packet with Douglas’s name on it lay on the front desk. He opened it: a tablet and a brief note of instruction from Barklay’s hand. Good.

As he was opening the door to the long quad between the school building and the tower, Stevens fell in with him.

“Going up the tower, are you? I’ll come with you, if you don’t mind.”

“I’m running an errand for Barklay,” Douglas said, hesitating. But enlightenment broke a second later and he shot Stevens a half-smile. “I see. It’s Ansley on duty tonight, isn’t it. I didn’t know you were still cultivating her.”

“They say patience is a virtue,” Stevens said. “I’ll probably sleep alone tonight, but it’s worth trying.”

“I admire your persistent keenness,” Douglas said, chuckling. They went out into the long quad between the school building and the tower. Stevens put his hood up against the rain; Douglas, who was from the North, didn’t bother.

“Why don’t you ask Speir?” Douglas said. “I bet she’d be interested.”

“I did,” Stevens said. “She just smiled and said no thank you. I gather from the context that she’s too single-minded to give much time to extracurricular stuff. Bit like you, may be.”

Douglas snorted at that last. “Hard luck for you,” he said.

“Don’t I know it. I bet it would have been fun. She put me on my ass _twice_.”

“I saw that, my comrade. Very impressive.”

“It was a good match. Any more cadets like her coming up in your section? I hold out some hope of getting beat before I leave.”

It was impossible to pass up a straight line like that. “Just like you hold out some hope of getting laid before you leave?”

Stevens shoved him playfully, and they both laughed.

The evening gloom darkened the air as they reached the tower and engaged its open lift to carry them to the top. At the summit, Douglas gave Lieutenant Ansley his codes, docked the tablet to transfer its digests to Inslee’s line once it was open, and then wandered to the windows to wait and allow Stevens his opportunity.

The tower was older than the school: it was hard to say exactly how old it was, but it was possible it dated back to the bad times, or even before; yet it probably wasn’t as old as the cloister foundations on the far side of the school complex, toward the south coast. Its current function was to gather and encode com signals, but in older incarnations it had probably controlled the airfield, which was much smaller now, a green expanse as flat as the quads of the school itself, terraced against the rain.

There was one shuttle parked on the airfield; in the dim evening light Douglas could make out three figures standing near it—the two Council lords, and Barklay. The shuttle was big enough to carry them not just to the tram depot but all the way back to the capital: a true flying visit, then. As Douglas watched, the two got into the shuttle, and Barklay headed back toward the school alone: his pace was steady, but Douglas could detect a bit of a plod in his usually-vigorous stride. Barklay sponsored his school as wholeheartedly as he might have sponsored his own child, including playing gracious host to interested parties on the political side, and he’d been doing it for twenty years, ever since he’d come back from his tour of duty on the other side of the strait. Even now he rarely showed weariness, unless you knew what to look for.

This was the third such impromptu visit in a month. Douglas thought this worrisome, though Barklay had discussed the import of these visits with nobody, passing them off as mere politics and nothing else. Perhaps there was a change coming in the stasis of the war; perhaps there was a shake-up brewing in the higher echelons of the military; perhaps Ryswyck’s reputation as a tight-knit enclave with odd customs had unnerved somebody in the Council enough to poke around looking for trouble. It was hard to tell.

Barklay had named his school after the little hamlet in which he’d been born, a fact which every Ryswyckian seemed to learn by osmosis, because Barklay never talked about his home, as if talking about it would summon its fate to haunt them. Reyswick village was a crater now, and Barklay its only living scion, and though Douglas was of the generation who had never known Ilona at peace, it was hard to misunderstand the forlorn defiance of that symbolism. He reminded himself of it sometimes, when he was feeling tired and exasperated.

Up here in the tower, with Ryswyck Academy below him and the coastal hills all around, Douglas caught his mental breath and regained his grasp of the wider world. Below, Barklay had become a shadowy figure moving in the twilight darkness, growing sharper when he reached the light spilling from the ground-floor windows.

Douglas turned to see Stevens getting into the lift. He tipped Douglas a wink as he passed, though it was an equal probability whether he meant by it that he’d secured an assignation, or crashed and burned.

The reply was ready. Douglas checked it, locked the tablet with his code, and thanked Ansley properly before calling up the lift himself.

As he’d expected, Barklay had gone straight back to his office: he was at his desk when Douglas knocked on the doorframe.

“Ah, Douglas, good. I’ve just finished seeing off our guests, and was hoping Inslee’s dispatch would come back soon.”

After a short silence Douglas was nerved to ask: “Sir, is there trouble brewing?”

Barklay blinked and looked up. “Why—oh, because of the Council visitors. No, there’s no trouble. Well, no more than usual,” he corrected himself dryly. “Oh, don’t look at me like that. As far as I know all is well.”

“Yes, sir,” Douglas said, burying his skepticism.

Barklay wasn’t fooled, but instead of pursuing it he settled for giving Douglas his dry smile. “Is that the dispatch you’ve got there?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, I’ll take it now, then. Bring it in.” He closed the folder he was perusing and moved it to the top of a pile at his side. “And shut the door, will you, Douglas?”

“Yes, sir,” Douglas said.

*

“And get this off to General Barklay down at Ryswyck; his com tower’s waiting for my reply. Security code four. And that will be all, Captain Amis. Get yourself to bed after this.”

“Yes, sir,” Amis said, already on his way out.

The sun was down: Inslee could see his own tired face reflected in the windows of his office, and within that reflection the shadow of the weather tower of Cardumel Base.

Amis leaned back in. “Sir, you’ve got an open-line request from Colonel Marshall. Shall I—”

“No, I’ll talk to him,” Inslee said wearily. “Bounce him over.”

“Yes, sir.”

Inslee drew up his com-deck and tapped the acceptance code.

“Good evening, General.” Colonel Marshall saluted him with a quick flash of his outward palm.

Inslee returned the salute. “Colonel Marshall. What can I do for you?”

“It’s more what I can do for you,” Marshall said cheerfully. He looked disgustingly hale and rested. “You fellows recovered from winter yet?”

“Very nearly,” Inslee said, dry to the point of sarcasm. “By the time we’ve set everything to rights, it’ll be near icefall again.”

“Be glad we’re not on the western side of the Ridge. At least here we can burn through the glaze. Eventually.”

This was true enough, but Inslee found it hard to be grateful.

Marshall went on. “Your supply requisition has come early, to speak of miracles, and I’d like to send it along. Only Colmhaven flotilla can’t spare ships for the convoy till next week. Have you got any of the Boundary resting at Colm’s Island? You could send ‘em across and get your supplies faster. Give ‘em something to do, too.”

“Hm,” Inslee said. “Let me communicate with Admiral Eysgarth and see what I can scare up. I’ll send you a message in the morning with what I find out.”

The list of things Inslee had to do always grew a long tail just before he was scheduled to sleep, but this was a welcome task. Perhaps there’d be some fresher food provisions in the convoy. Inslee thanked Marshall sincerely and closed the line.

Inslee had been at this post for ten years, years in which not Berenians but supply requisition forms invaded his dreams; a far cry from the visions of glory he’d entertained in his youth, of sweeping over the strait to crush the threat of attack once and for all. He’d served in the expeditionary forces with distinction, and his gifts for discipline and tactical organization had won him promotion out of the field, even as the field widened across the water. Ilona had lost all that ground since, of course, and fallen back behind the naval lines that guarded the island’s coast.

And that was the way things had stayed for twenty years, barring a few Berenian attempts at invasion and occasional Ilonian raids on their shipping. Ilona didn’t have the personnel to launch another invasion; and nobody on either side had the money. Instead of glorious charges, Inslee had devoted his career to careful and quotidian vigilance. Colm’s Island was Ilona’s citadel of the north, and Inslee made it his business to know everything that happened on and around it.

Inslee got a secure audio line to Admiral Eysgarth, who confirmed that he did indeed have ships to spare for a convoy of supplies; it helped, Inslee thought wryly, that a resupply of Cardumel benefited him also. That was another of the virtues for which he’d won this post: a knack for intra-service diplomacy.

He spent another half an hour clearing off his desk, and was just about to get up and head toward the sleep of the just when the com tower buzzed him with an open-line request from General Barklay. Inslee damned intra-service diplomacy and accepted the call.

“General Inslee,” Barklay greeted him, with a smart salute. His collar and insignia were as crisp as ever, but there were dark creases under his eyes. Good, _somebody_ was as tired as Inslee this evening.

“General Barklay,” Inslee greeted him in return. “I wasn’t expecting a conference so soon after my return message.”

“No?” Barklay said. “But you didn’t—ah. I see; I am keeping you from your rest. Forgive me. Now, about those officers—”

“Yes,” Inslee sighed. “Of my officers, I’m afraid only Amis would do for your purposes, and I can’t spare him.” Holding his irritation in check, he added, “The request really ought to go the other way—I need officers from you more than you from me. The morale here could stand some improvement.”

“Hm. I haven’t got any junior officers who are quite ready for promotion, though I’ll certainly keep my eye on that for you. How many of mine have you got there now?”

“Lieutenant Barr and Lieutenant Angus. They’re shaping well. And I’ve a few of the rank-and-file who passed through your service course last year; they are all pretty reliable, though not yet officer material.”

“Yes,” Barklay said, thoughtfully. “And there was that unfortunate debacle a few years ago with Lieutenant Kerra….”

Well, since Barklay mentioned it himself… “Yes,” Inslee said with another sigh. “If only he hadn’t decided that the solution to the distribution problem was to divert resources and alter the documents after. Well, he took his court-martial with characteristic grace. You certainly teach your men and women pretty manners.”

He saw the flash of defensive anger in Barklay’s eyes, but sensed that it would only make matters worse to walk his last sentence back. But Barklay only said simply, “The court-martial wasn’t cosmetic. If I did my job, his manners weren’t either.”

“Quite,” Inslee said, and let that stand for his apology. To his relief, Barklay’s feathers went down.

“Well,” he said, “I shall have to cast my net a little wider for good teaching officers, it seems. I’ll keep your needs in mind as well.”

“Please do,” Inslee said.

They exchanged salutes, and Inslee closed the line, getting up as he did so. It was definitely time for him to sleep, if he was fraying at relations even with good colleagues. 

At the door he shut down the lights. His office was high enough to see above the light-shields of the weather tower: through the windows Inslee could see the officer inside going about his duties. It was a rare clear night on Colm's Island; soon the rain would move in again and resume the long process of washing the winter's ice away. For the moment, at least, all was well.

Inslee went to catch his few hours' sleep before any other little items could line up on his desk.

*

The sun had gone down over the sea, in a blaze of chaotic color that promised another fair day tomorrow. Emmerich Duras lightly swirled the last few swallows of wine in his glass and watched the sky darken, revealing by degrees his own reflection in the full-length window.

He was a spare, neat man, not overtall, with graying dark hair and keen black eyes, whose habitual expression was one of gathered intention, like a cat preparing to spring. He took a long time about springing, but when he finally did, the result was terrible to behold.

It was that quality which had propelled him to the top of command in the capital at Bernhelm. His strategic marriage to the daughter of one of the old lords had made him a natural choice for a compromise between the military party and the receding aristocracy of Berenia. Duras now looked down upon the capital as Lord Bernhelm: its glittering lights, reflected in the estuary in its midst, were his possession and his responsibility.

Over the years since his ascendance, he had consolidated the resources and infrastructures of the country, saving it from financial ruin, and put any budget surplus into quiet military preparations. The trickiest part had been teaching his patience to the rest of the war party, but that too had fallen into place.

Behind him, a light knock sounded on the door and Captain Alsburg entered, reflected in the glass. “My lord,” he said, “the intelligence report is in.”

“Very good, Alsburg,” Duras said quietly. “I’ll receive it in the small briefing room, in half an hour.”

“Yes, my lord,” Alsburg said. The door clicked shut behind his departure.

He had been looking forward to this report for a long time, ever since they had broken some of the enemy codes for their communication frequencies. The highest-security levels were still blocked to them, but quiet listening to unguarded conversations was bound to accrue to good intelligence. His patience was paying off. Duras could feel it. Though full darkness had now descended over the horizon, he cast his gaze westward, toward his enemy. By now the sunset light would have gone also from the sky over the island of Verlac, its strongholds and coasts; they were all in the darkness together. A darkness in which he would soon extract his revenge.

Duras swallowed the last of his wine. Then he set the empty wineglass on the sideboard and went out of his office, to hear what news his spies had been listening to.


	2. Chapter 2

Speir pulled out her battered school tablet and laid it on the table next to her breakfast tray. There was not much chance of being able to study in this din for the meteorology exam Captain Dury had set her, but it was worth the attempt to review her notes for the last time.

Breakfast at Ryswyck was not a quiet affair.  It was the one time of day in which everyone was present in the same place at the same time—breakfast, that is, and when the whistle blew to start a match in the arena.  The first- and second-year cadets, a larger class by far than the junior officer class, were the noisiest, mobbing one another from bench to bench, working off their youthful high spirits.  The majority of students entering Ryswyck were twenty or twenty-one, having just come off their national service and completed basic training at their local base.  Speir, at the ripe old age of twenty-three, observed their antics with a benevolence she suspected to be mostly borrowed against the dignity of her promotion.

Someone rang the small bell at the door, and everyone rose swiftly to their feet.  A sudden disorienting silence fell as General Barklay entered with two of the teaching officers; he waved them all down, and very quickly the din resumed.  Some of the students went to greet Barklay as he got his breakfast tray and sat down at a bench; how Barklay managed to get any meal eaten was a mystery to Speir, but somehow he did it.

Speir bent over her notes and spooned up a bite of farina, the voices of her classmates rising in a cacophonous canopy over her head.  She had taken to Ryswyck from her first week as a cadet like a fish released into water, and though familiarity had weathered the edges of her delight, she still took a simple pleasure in the humming busy activity that kept the Academy going like a turbine.

Presently Barklay rose, and Speir looked up when people around her started taking their trays to the hatch.  She made to put away her tablet so that she could do the same, but her neighbor said to her, “Shall I take yours too?” and she thanked him and remained where she was.  Her bench was already facing the dais at the far end of the hall; the one across the trestle from her was already refilling with students facing the other direction.  Silence gradually settled once more, and everyone rose to their feet when Barklay nodded from the dais at Ellis, who began to lead the morning orison.

Voices that had ground against each other in chaotic turmoil, like rocks in a jar, now smoothed together, like the striations of a cool and powerful muscle, rising and then falling to a pregnant hum for Ellis’s next versicle.  It was said that every Ilonian had a good voice, but the truth was that every Ilonian learned at an early age how to use what voice she or he had.  Most everyone could sing the chants of the tradition, and many could lead them.

Barklay drew up to the lectern after the chant was finished, and the students all found their seats.

“Good morning,” he said, and there was a murmur of returned greeting.  “I’ve a few announcements before I turn over the assembly to Captain Marag.  First, the rota captains have asked me to remind you that today is a new rotation, and there are the inevitable changes to be worked out.  Junior officers, please find your captains after the assembly to get your briefing.  Second.  We’ve received requests for another service course to be conducted here, both from Amity Base and two of the naval commanders at Central Command.  As you know, it is a great deal of work to conduct a service course, and a second one, I think, too much for the number of junior and senior officers we have.  Therefore, I am taking volunteers from among the second-year cadets—” there was a frisson of delight from the second-years— “to supply the necessary teaching assistance.  If you are interested in volunteering, please speak to one of the officers in charge of your section, and the most suitable and available second-years will be put on the teaching schedule.  I am at this point particularly interested in those studying for the navy, but will not turn away army volunteers.”

Barklay waited for the whisper of excited comment to die down before continuing.  “Third,” he said, “the guest quarters are currently being occupied by a large crew who are working on the turbines over at Benel River Station.  Please extend to them your hospitality and help them with anything they may need, such as letting them use the drying cupboards in your wing when the others are full, and so on.  And fourth and last: I request that those who enjoy the privilege of audiovisual calls out of Ryswyck not abuse that privilege.  It is better courtesy to allow the com tower crew to pursue their priorities, and not have to juggle secure transmissions with multiple requests for open lines.  When you use the com-deck station, please ask the tower crew if it is an optimal time to request an open line for a personal call.  Let me also remind you to observe military security in your conversations, and if you must transmit sensitive information, record your communication and send it by a secure line.

And now I will turn over the lectern to Captain Marag.”  Barklay laid his closed hand over his breast, in the Ryswyckian gesture that here meant thanks, and stepped back.

Captain Marag stepped forward, greeted the student body with a brief smile, and made a list of detailed announcements about the week’s coursework (to which everyone listened with conscious patience), and a few announcements on the week’s matches (to which everyone listened with unfeigned interest).  Barklay dismissed the assembly, and the hall exploded into noise as the students clattered up, cadets hurrying to classes, junior officers dodging about to find their rotas.  Speir put her tablet back in her scrip, hitched the strap comfortably on her far shoulder, and got up to do the same.

A Rota had begun to collect to the side of the dais, next to the Ilonian banner and out of the way of traffic.  Speir reached them to hear Douglas saying, “We’ll need to meet with E Rota to give our briefing on the classroom duties, so I agreed with Cameron we’d compare notes in the north wing in about—” he glanced at the clock— “a quarter of an hour from now.  Meanwhile Ellis has promised me he’d be present to brief us when we take our sections for sparring practice this afternoon, so that should be covered.”

A quarter of an hour would be just enough for Speir to get to her quarters and back with all that she would need for the morning’s classes.  With luck, the briefing wouldn’t make her late for her exam with Dury.  When A Rota’s consultation broke up, she left the hall quickly.

All the same, she was caught up by Cadet Baxter on her way to the north wing for a long query about the cadet match schedule; Speir extricated herself as graciously as she could and sped her pace, but she was still the last one to arrive in the teachers’ workroom.

“Ah, Speir, there you are,” Cameron said, looking up from where she hung over a table reviewing a scorebook.  “You’re assisting Marag in supply management, aren’t you?  Come here and consult with me and Neely.”

Cameron had taken Speir under her wing in the first weeks after her promotion; her kindness was beginning to feel a little officious, but Speir had decided it did no harm to let Cameron do her the favor.  It seemed to be Cameron’s style, rather than an indication that Speir still had to prove her competence.

It helped, though, that Cameron was navy.  Speir went forward with a comfortable smile to brief Cameron and Neely on the week’s lessons in supply management.

There were no surprises for E Rota to absorb for their week’s duties: the students’ classwork scores had continued on their expected trendlines, none of the senior officers had altered the lesson planning, and the general exam was still a few weeks away.  The last few minutes of the briefing found most of the two rotas chatting about inconsequential things.

Turnbull was regaling several others with a very old and complicated joke involving a Northern farmer, a Southern businessman, and a Berenian, all of whom for various reasons were failing to win sexual favors from a woman in a bar.  The Berenian came off worst, of course, and Speir shifted uncomfortably, thinking to herself that if Barklay were present, Turnbull would be in a great deal of trouble for repeating this joke.  Barklay’s low tolerance for caricature was legendary, which was probably why Turnbull had lowered his voice.

But even in a low voice he could tell the joke with animation, and he managed to make the tired punch line amusing enough that several people broke into illicit snickers.

“Yes, well,” Ahrens said, laughing, “I hear that up north they have a hard time telling the women from farm animals anyway.”

A sudden silence descended.  The room was heavy with conviction that Ahrens had gone too far:  Speir followed the others’ gazes to see Douglas, twisted round in his chair and regarding Ahrens with ominous detachment.

“Would you care to repeat that, Ahrens?” he said, in an uninflected voice that made Speir suspend her breath.

With an attempt at ease, Ahrens said, “Oh, I’m sorry, Douglas.  I forgot you were from the North.  I meant no offense.”

Douglas got up, and everyone drew out of his way.  He came toward Ahrens without an ounce of threat; threat, Speir thought, was wholly unnecessary.

“That’s not good enough,” Douglas said quietly.  “I may be present, but you were discourteous to a whole population who aren’t here to defend themselves.”

“Douglas, I didn’t—”

“Have you ever been to a Northern farm?” Douglas pressed him.

“No,” Ahrens admitted.

“Have you ever been north of KillnessPass, yourself?”  Speir could hear clearly now the musical accent of the North country under Douglas’s educated tones.  Next to her, Cameron sucked in her lips and held her breath.

“No—”

“Does your mother have any relatives up there?”

“No.”

“Do you know what you’re talking about at all, Ahrens?”

Ahrens gave a sigh, lips pursed.  “No, Douglas.  I don’t.”

“Then may I suggest you think twice in the future before you make sport from your own ignorance,” Douglas said.

The two men’s gazes were locked.  The force of Douglas’s attention was palpable, and made no room for Ahrens at all.  The others could therefore see clearly the act of courage it took for Ahrens to drop his defensive challenge and bring his closed hand to his breast.

“I own the fault,” Ahrens said hardily.  “I’m sorry.  Forgive me.”

All eyes went to Douglas.  For a moment he showed no response: then slowly he drew in a breath and straightened up and away, and Speir could breathe again.

“All’s well,” Douglas said, and then in a softer voice to the room at large, “Excuse me.”  He made his way quietly out from among them and was gone.

Ahrens puffed a heavy breath and plowed a hand through his hair.  “Merciful hell.  I thought sure we were headed to the arena for that.”

“I think Turnbull bears some of that fault,” Cameron said sharply, rounding on him.  “What possessed you to repeat that stupid joke?”

“The sex part was funny,” Turnbull said, defensively.

“Well, maybe you could devote your considerable wit to inventing a funny sex joke that doesn’t denigrate anyone’s heritage.”

“Well, there’s an idea,” Turnbull said.  A hint of his usual mischievous smile returned to his face.  “But I didn’t mean to insult anyone’s heritage, honestly—and it’s not as if anyone came out unscathed—”

“You know that’s not the point,” Cameron retorted, and echoing Speir’s earlier thought, added, “What would Barklay say if he heard that?”

“What would I say if I heard what?”

They all turned to see Barklay leaning casually through the doorway.  He raised an eyebrow at Cameron, who directed his gaze at Turnbull.  Turnbull changed color twice, but answered readily enough.

“I told an offensive joke, sir,” he said.

“Oh?  Which one?”

Turnbull, not squirming by visible effort, said: “Well, sir, it involves a Northern farmer, a Southern businessman, and a Berenian…. Do you want me to tell it?”  He didn’t look like he fancied the prospect.

“No, never mind,” Barklay said calmly, “I think I’ve heard it.  Or one like it.  How would you characterize the result?”

“Sir?”

“Of telling the joke.”

“Unexpected conflict, sir,” Turnbull said with a sigh.

“Unexpected by you,” Barklay clarified.

Turnbull looked increasingly chagrined.  “Yes, sir.”

“And what do you conclude from that result?” Barklay said.

“That I should have expected it?” Turnbull said, dryly.

“Well, that will do for a beginning.”  But Barklay clearly was waiting for Turnbull to improve his answer.

Finally Turnbull sighed.  “Cameron suggests I come up with a sex joke that is funny without insulting anyone’s heritage,” he said, by way of confession.

“A very creative solution,” Barklay said.  “You’ll have to tell it to me when you’ve worked it out.  And,” he added as Turnbull looked at him in faint horror, “I’m sure it will make a nice diverting little item in next month’s junior officer meeting agenda.”

“Oh, yes, sir,” Cameron said, with a very straight face.  “I’m sure the rota captains can make room for a good clean sex joke.”

“Would that all meetings boasted such pleasant agendas,” Barklay said.  With a brief grin he saluted them lightly and continued on his way.

“Thank you, Cameron,” Turnbull said sweetly, as soon as he was out of earshot.

“My pleasure, Turnbull,” Cameron replied in the same tone.

The carillon in the tower began to chime its call to classes, and the heavy passage of student feet echoed in the corridor outside.  “My exam,” Speir said, and then to Cameron, “Have we finished with the briefing?”

“Yes, yes, everyone’s dismissed,” Cameron said.  “You’re going to Dury, aren’t you?  I’ll walk with you, if you don’t mind.  I need to ask him a question about this week’s lessons.”

The junior officers of both rotas gathered up their tablets and scrips and scorebooks and exited, chatting with one another, on their way to their various duties.  Several chaffed Turnbull and Ahrens on their way out, which they took with good grace.  Speir and Cameron made their way against the current of human traffic and came out into the cloister corridor to the next wing where they could walk abreast.

“So have you got _all_ the troublemakers in your rota?” Speir said, teasing her gently.

“Just about,” Cameron sighed.  “Stevens took over C Rota two months ago when Harris got her commission, so at least I don’t have him.  But at least Stevens never gets into _fights_ with people.  I can’t believe Turnbull told that joke.  I’d have called him out myself if Barklay hadn’t happened by.”

“It wasn’t in very good taste,” Speir agreed.  “Luckily for him Ahrens drew off Douglas’s fire.”

Cameron shrugged.  “I’m sure Douglas has heard that joke a hundred times; no doubt he’s used to it.  But comparing his mother to a farm animal is probably just a _bit_ beyond the pale.”

Speir snorted at the understatement.  “Well, I look forward to hearing what Turnbull comes up with for the meeting.”

“So do I,” said Cameron, with a wicked grin.  “Let’s see what use he can make of his experience.”

Speir said slyly: “So is he any good in bed, then?”

“Surprisingly, yes,” Cameron said.  “But not better than I am.”

She glanced sidelong at Speir, with the faintest hint of a wink, and they both grinned.

*

“Since you ask me,” Douglas said— “I think it’s a bad idea, sir.”

They were in Barklay’s office with the door shut, ostensibly going over cadet training scoresheets.  Barklay had suspected by Douglas’s absence from the scene that Turnbull’s “unexpected conflict” had involved him; he had found him helping Beathas to administer a tactics-and-strategy exam to a class of second-years, and carried him off.  It had not been difficult to get the full story from Douglas; his anger had already subsided into a morose dispassion, and since Ahrens had owned his fault, Douglas spoke of the incident as closed.

Barklay liked to keep his finger on the pulse of student conflicts and intrigues; even when Douglas wasn’t involved, Barklay sometimes asked him for information on a matter, which Douglas gave him without cavil.  Douglas had a good evaluative sense of a situation as a whole, and an equally valuable sense of reticence and discretion.  It was therefore natural for Barklay to lay before him the situation that would be the subject of today’s lunch meeting of the senior officer teaching staff.  Douglas’s reactions were bound to be a good barometer.

“Well, I have to get my staff from somewhere,” Barklay pointed out.  “Dury goes back to Amity Base at the summer recess, and Forba isn’t available to replace him in the rotation this year.  I’m not ready to make waves with Lord Selkirk so soon after his installation.  Better to accept his candidate now and find someone else later.”

Douglas frowned.  “But if what you say is true, sir, it creates an excellent opportunity for the Council to stab you in the back.”

“I’m not going to be exposing my back,” Barklay said, looking up at Douglas mildly.  Douglas looked back, perfectly impassive.  It was impossible to rattle Douglas, but Barklay tried it every once in a while, for the data points.

“Back or front,” Douglas replied dryly, “it matters little.  Wherever you’ve let down your defenses is where the strike will come.”

“There are worse things than being undefended,” Barklay said, reaching for the printed lists of cadets and dividing them into sections.

“I understand that very well, sir—” Barklay looked up again, but Douglas’s expression remained serene and closed.  “But it’s best to be undefended to some good purpose.”

Barklay sat back in his chair and regarded Douglas thoughtfully.  “You think undefendedness should have a purpose?” he said, knowing Douglas would not fail to hear the overtones of that question.

“I think it should have a point,” Douglas said steadily.  “It’s a strategy like any other.”

“And sometimes,” Barklay said, with a musing glare at the rosters, “it is simply the best in a bad set of options.”

_I understand that too_ , Douglas did not say.  Nor did he look it.  But Barklay could feel the thought, as palpably as if Douglas had said it aloud.  Barklay sighed.

“As it happens,” he said, “I agree with you.  Undefendedness is a rewarding strategy but a desperate tactic.  If I had a better option I’d use it without hesitation.”  He did not suggest, nor did Douglas mention, the option of promoting someone from the junior officer ranks; Douglas knew as surely as he did that no junior officer had got close enough to finishing his or her course of study to accept a teaching commission.

Douglas hesitated and then said:  “Sir…is Lord Selkirk’s opposition to _you_ , personally, or to Ryswyck as an institution?”

Yes.  This was the question he would have to answer very carefully, and it was sure to be asked at lunch by one of his senior officers.  Barklay hated lying, but if he told the whole truth it would be sure to get back to Selkirk somehow and tip his hand.  Barklay hated tipping his hand, too.

He said slowly:  “Insofar as Ryswyck is an extension of my personality and interests, I believe Selkirk distrusts it.”

“Why doesn’t he like you, sir?”  Douglas asked it gently, like a mother probing a hurt.  Barklay didn’t look up.  At times he was visited with a terrible temptation to reach, to cling, to bury himself in all that Douglas had to offer, but he was not going to do that.  Never again.  There was one sense in which Douglas was his for the asking, and another sense in which Douglas was unshakably his own:  and it was this self-possession upon which Barklay depended so dearly.

“I believe…,” credibly, because Selkirk had once said as much, “that he thinks my courtesy goes no further than skin deep.”

Douglas made a little noise and waited for more.

“We have known each other long,” Barklay said, still feeling his way.  “He’s a good commander.  The military’s safe under his leadership, and I don’t think he’d sabotage an entire military academy just to hurt me.”

“But he wouldn’t mind getting the whip hand of you in the running of it,” Douglas said, astutely.

“No,” Barklay said with another sigh.  “He wouldn’t.”

Selkirk wasn’t the only person who found the ideal of courtesy too good to be true.  It had taken all the twenty years of his labor to show the Ilonian military what Ryswyckians could do, and though they recognized the general excellence of his alumni and honored the prestige of his entrance standards, the best-disposed of his colleagues were still gently skeptical of both the method and the principle.  Barklay had set himself to patience and discipline, and vowed to outlast the skepticism.

But he had a feeling that the newly-created Lord High Commander Alban Selkirk was going to put that patience and discipline to the test.

“So if not sabotage,” Douglas said, “then surveillance.”

That was the trouble with confiding in Douglas, of course.  One couldn’t expect him to grasp some implications and leave others alone.

“I have nothing to hide,” Barklay said archly, and didn’t register that it was a lie till it was out of his mouth.

“Then of course surveillance won’t trouble you, sir,” Douglas said.

Again Barklay leaned back in his chair.  “You think me reckless,” he said, after a long silence.

“I would never say that, sir,” Douglas said calmly.

Not in so many words.  Barklay found himself smiling up at him.  “Point taken,” he said.

“Is it so, sir?”  But he’d gotten Douglas to smile back, if reluctantly.

“I always value your counsel, Lieutenant.  Now, if you will oblige me…no.”  Barklay looked with regret at the clock.  “I haven’t time for any more of this; I’ve got to pay a visit to the foreman of the turbine crew before I meet with the senior officers.  We’ll see if they agree with you.  Perhaps they can offer me the option of a less desperate tactic.  But I doubt it.  You may go.”

“Yes, sir.”  Douglas bowed—courtesy in him was natural, and Ryswyck had honed it to a delicate but deadly point—and let himself out, shutting the door behind him quietly.

The argument was not over by any means.  Barklay shook his head in rueful admiration, turned his chair, and stretched up to return to the halls of his school.

*

The exam was every bit as grueling as Speir had anticipated, but she scored well on it, and got a commendation from Dury on her essay linking the spring weather statistics to the supply management problem that had been set for the cadets the week before.  “The best defense may be a good offense,” Speir had written, “but the reverse is often just as true.”  “Defense isn’t often glorious,” Dury had agreed, “but it is essential.”

Afterwards, released from the burden of concentrated care, she was ravenous, but she had only time to pass through the mess hall and snag a greenhouse plum and a roll before heading back to her quarters to change into training clothes.  She arrived at the arena complex sucking the last scraps of flesh from the plum stone, and dropped the remainder in the waste bin as she entered the large training room, brushed the rain from the surface of her piled-up hair with her other hand, and made use of the moisture to get her plum hand unsticky.  The cadet section of which A Rota had charge, plus cadets of the other sections whose schedules would permit attending training when their section wasn’t in session, were already gathering at the warm-up stations, and she went the rounds and checked that all the stations were in working order and being used properly.

When enough of the cadets had arrived to justify it, she and her fellow officers helped them form into organized units to practice moves, some with padded batons rehearsing thrusts and parries, some at the bag-bar practicing punches; Speir undertook to supervise these.

Ellis arrived during this stage, looking a bit harried.  He sought out Douglas where he was moving alongside a set of first-year cadets learning a new baton thrust, waited politely till Douglas had finished getting them started, and then pulled a scorebook out of his scrip.  Speir left her cadets to continue their practice, and went to hear his brief.

“I’ve got the sparring calendar loaded on a tablet here,” Ellis was saying.  “You may have to redouble a few pairings, just because of the way the schedule fell out, or else substitute one of your rota.  I think Grant and Nala shouldn’t be paired together for a while; they’ve been reinforcing one another’s bad habits.”

“Any of your rota coming to the sparring court today?” Douglas asked.

“I haven’t got a definite from any of them, but I think a few; at least me,” Ellis replied, and Douglas nodded.  “Two of my cadets have matches next week, so they’ll be sure to be there training with your section.  If you don’t mind, will you keep me up on how they’re doing?”

“Certainly,” Douglas said.

“And I’ve taken two long-distance runs to the inlet and back.  The times should be on the tablet with the other things.”

“Thank you.”

More cadets arrived and began to warm up.  Ellis and Douglas drew some apart to divide them into sparring pairs, and assigned them to the four drawn circles on the training floor.  Of the cadets that remained, Grant was left over, so Speir volunteered to take her.  She strapped on a headguard and a set of pads, and changed into the pair of grip-soled training slippers she’d brought in her scrip.  “Baton?” she asked Grant, who was holding a padded one; “Please,” Grant said.

Speir had fresh memory of what it was like to attend training as a cadet, of the heavy current of custom bearing her along down the schedule: as a junior officer, she was also responsible for tending the stream, and so was no longer submerged over the head.  It was perhaps the most difficult adjustment one had to make after promotion, and Speir watched the cadets as they worked, theorizing who of them might be able to develop that consciousness quickly.

The sparring court began; a large number of cadets had gathered in the training hall, along with a number of junior officers who had come to practice or just to observe.  The officers of A Rota took turns judging the four circles, switching periodically to allow them all a chance to observe and comment on technique.  At last Grant came to the front of the queue, and Speir handed over her whistle to one of her rota-mates, picked up a padded baton, and stepped into the circle.

This was the moment that always charged her blood with lightning joy: even in sparring practice, the act of facing another prepared for deadly contact and the buoyant humility with which she and the other exchanged bows, together lifted up Speir’s soul to exultant awareness.  The whistle blew, and the sparring match began.

Grant came at her with speed, but still Speir could read her intent easily; she parried the thrust two-handed, forcing Grant off course, and twisted to jab her from behind with the end of her baton.  Grant put up a block just in time, and spun away quickly to return to the attack.

Speir preferred the open-hand format as a rule, but the virtue of working with batons was the forced awareness of a whole plane and not just the line-trajectory of a single blow.  She feinted, as if to hook Grant’s ankle, and at the last moment slammed the other end of the baton across the cadet’s chest.  Grant went down, rolled to block Speir’s following stroke with the broad side of her baton, sprang to her feet under cover of the block, and again came at Speir, leading with her left.

To test the habit, Speir eluded her blow and then drew her out again: yes, there was the thing Ellis was talking about.  Speir got clear of Grant’s blow a second time, and waited to see if that would alert her to the habit.  It didn’t, so the third time Grant came at her from the left, Speir met her with a full-power thrust with the end of the baton into her shoulder, just where her lead was gaining momentum.  Grant was thrown back hard, reeled a few steps, and crashed to the deck with a grunt of pain.

The whistle peeped.

“I told you, Grant.  Stop getting used to only one lead,” Ellis said, from where he stood observing.  “Last week it was your right.  Now it’s your left.  Don’t just get ready for what’s coming; get your awareness above that.”  Grant nodded as she scrambled slowly to her feet.  “And don’t wait for Speir to refrain from eating you alive before you get your bearings,” Ellis added, dryly.

Speir grinned involuntarily.  Seeing it, Grant broke into half a grin herself.  She bowed to Ellis in acknowledgement of his advice, came back to the mark, and saluted Speir.

“We’ve not time for another whole round,” Douglas told them.  Speir glanced his way: he had taken over the whistle and held his watch in his hand.  _Awareness above what’s coming_ , Speir thought, in admiring chagrin.  Douglas was scheduled against her in next week’s junior officer match; he wouldn’t miss this opportunity to observe her technique.  Speir made a mental note to observe him closely in return during the course of the week.

“You’d have time for a sudden death round,” Douglas went on.  “First throw ends the match.”

“Sounds good,” Speir said, and Grant gave an agreeing nod.

Douglas started the round with a peep of his whistle.  Instead of going straight for the attack, Grant hung back and waited, eyes glittering, for Speir to make a move.  Good, the cadet was learning.  This would save Speir a decision on how quickly to end it.  She advanced, testing Grant’s attention with a few quick blows; Grant blocked them all neatly without losing more than a few steps.  Before Grant could control their placement by backing up, Speir backed off herself and waited for her opening.

Grant advanced without betraying her intent; on a hunch, Speir feinted once more to Grant’s right, sidestepped a swipe at her ankles, and put up her baton before Grant could raise hers in defense.  Grant’s momentum brought her hard against the level bar of Speir’s baton—she twisted to keep her equilibrium, and Speir used that motion, catching Grant’s baton with her own and dragging it from her grip, then planting the end of her baton between Grant’s feet and tripping her as she twisted.  Grant went down, and her baton fell with a padded thump over her legs.  Not elegant, but effective.  The whistle peeped.

Grant got slowly to her feet, smiling ruefully, and accepted Speir’s salute with closed hand to her breast.

There was a fusillade of whistle peeps, and the sparring circles with their observers dislimned.  The cadets and junior officers who had come for training began to disperse, either toward their showers and classwork, or to the smaller rooms circling the arena for further personal training.  Speir pulled off her headguard and padding, congratulated Grant on a good sparring session, and went to help her rota set the room to rights before heading to her own shower.

Supper was going to taste so good.  Speir strode at double pace, straight for her quarters as the bee flies—and was brought up short by Lieutenant Bell of D Rota coming the other direction.

“Speir,” he said, “just a moment.  You have a message arrived at the com tower.  Marked from the capital, Dal Veterans’ Med House.”

“Oh?”  A curl of apprehension wound round Speir’s empty stomach.  “When did it come in?”

“Just an hour ago,” Bell said.  “I’ve come off duty, so I decided to tell you on my way to supper.  It should be there if you code in to the com-deck station.”

“Thank you, Bell,” Speir said.  “I appreciate it.”

Bell nodded and went on his way.

Speir drew a breath against a small qualm of nausea and went forward more deliberately.  Instead of going straight to her quarters, she detoured to the com-deck station at her end of the junior officers’ wing and closed the door to show it was occupied.  She sat down at the console and coded herself in.

The face that sprang to life on the projection was her father’s—not some Med House tech bearing bad news:  Speir remembered suddenly to breathe.

“My dear Stephanie,” he said.  “I hope this finds you well and thriving.”

In his prime Jamis Leam had been a broad-shouldered, broad-faced man with a laugh that put heart into anybody within earshot.  Even after his return from active service, he had struck the observer as sturdy and hale, if quieter; Speir remembered riding on his shoulders through the echoing halls of the Naval Headquarters where he worked, both of them laughing every time they greeted a passerby.

Now, in the recording, he was smaller and indrawn, his grey eyes not quite focused, his faded copper hair awkwardly combed; Speir could tell that it had been done for him, because her father never parted his hair like that.

But his smile, though worn, was still true.  “This is a bit late, I know, but I wanted to send you greetings on the occasion of your promotion.  I’ve already worn everyone out talking about my daughter at Ryswyck, probably more even than I remember—but they’re well trained here. I’ll test their training talking about my daughter the _officer_ at Ryswyck, I will.”  His grin wrung Speir’s heart.

Her father glanced down before him, seeming to move his hand though it was out of view.  “What—oh, yes.  I am very well today; there was a musical evening here at the house, with some lovely voices singing—spring songs, I believe.  Yes.  It was very nice.  The food continues to be abysmal, but that’s the Navy for you.”  That was one of her father’s jokes: the food was only really abysmal if he was silent about it.

Yes; he was very well today.  Speir knew that was why he had waited late before sending her a message, and why he’d chosen today to record it.

After a few more stilted pleasantries, her father said: “If I don’t see you again before long, I’ll wish you a happy summer season now.  Be sure and go out for a picnic—don’t spend all the sunlight on work, now.”  He looked down again, and there was a soft noise like a note-sheet turned over.  “Take good care, my dear, and congratulations again; I am so proud.  I send all my love.”

There the recording ended.

Speir had to record a return message now; later she might lose her courage to smile back.  So she keyed the recorder and returned her father a message in kind: thanks for his congratulations, a few dry anecdotes from the weeks since her promotion, a description of today’s sparring court, the morning’s meteorology exam.  “And by the way, we are to expect a good summer, if the measurements are right, so I will be sure to take that picnic.  If it works out that we can, I’ll take you with me,” as if it were not an open question whether Jamis Leam would have mind left to go anywhere by then; there was no telling how long this would drag out.  “Be well,” she ended, and, “be good.  I love you.”

She marked the recording with the security code and logged it to be sent when the com tower retrieved messages.

Briskly, she got up and returned at last to her quarters, where she peeled off her training tunic and knit trousers, flung them neatly over the edge of her laundry hamper, wrapped herself in her light bathrobe, and turned on the shower.

There, in the doorway to the tiny bathroom, she came to a stop.  She stood leaning against the doorjamb without turning on the light, the steam of the hot water pouring gently around her, and for a moment stayed unmoving.

They had always known it would be like this.  They had known since the day of the diagnosis.  There was nothing to be surprised at, nothing to make her rear back in indignation.  It was like a cosmic arbitrary fault.

Speir shrugged out of her robe, wiped the tears from her cheeks, and washed off the residue under the needle-hot spray of the shower.  She scrubbed quickly and then put her face directly under the water, letting its warmth course over her and down, for an extra minute before getting out.

As she pinned up her wet hair in the little mirror over the sink, she met her own eye, looking up with her chin lowered: the expression serious but equable once more, presentable in the mess hall, certainly.  All the same she dressed more slowly than usual, to give herself more time to reach full equilibrium.  Linen shirt with black cravat, her clean gray slacks with their pressed crease, the matching tunic with its short lapel, high buttons, and red-lined snap-on hood (an entirely practical ornament).  She smoothed the red-and-black lieutenant’s ribbons clipped to her epaulets, turned down the linen collar over that of the tunic, and slipped on her black shoes.

There.  All present and correct.

Most of the junior officer class was still at supper when she arrived in the mess hall.  She put her tray down at a table with some from her rota and several others, who were largely finished eating but lingered to chat with one another over their plates.  After an exchange of greetings she tucked into her potato chowder, and found herself very hungry.

“Speir,” came someone’s greeting.  She looked up, spoon paused, to see Douglas taking his seat on the bench across from her.  He had no tray; she assumed he had finished his supper already.  She nodded back.

“We’re scheduled together for next week’s match,” he said, without preamble.  “Shall we choose a format now?”

She had forgotten about the upcoming match.  “All right,” she said.

“I know you favor open-hand,” he said: the opening gambit in the delicate dance of format-choosing.

“I do,” she said, taking another bite of chowder, “but I wouldn’t mind a little go with the baton for a change.”  Douglas favored the baton, as she well knew.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather school me like you did Stevens?” Douglas said, with a sly half-grin.  She grinned back.

“Some of those bruises lasted for weeks,” she said.  “I saw last winter you almost got him, yourself.”

“Almost,” he admitted, “but not quite.  But we were working in my preferred format.”

“Yes,” Speir said, and added straightforwardly, “You saw my work this afternoon.  Would I offer you a decent challenge at the baton?”

He sized her up thoughtfully.  “Unbated?  Yes, I think so.”

“Well, then—”  But Speir was interrupted by the sudden arrival of Ahrens, who plunked himself down next to her on the bench.

“Douglas,” he started, realized that he’d broken in on a conversation, and drew back.  “Sorry,” he said to Speir.

“No, no,” she said, “we were only choosing our format for next week.  Go on, if you like.”

He gave her a brief dip of the head and turned to Douglas again.  “How may I mend my fault?” he said, earnestly.

Douglas raised an eyebrow.  “I think it’s mended already, Ahrens.  Unless you had something in mind.”

Ahrens shook his head.  “I hadn’t.  So I thought I’d better ask you.”  Douglas had no answer for him, so Ahrens went on.  “I don’t know what I was thinking.  It was a careless and hateful thing to think and a discourteous thing to say, and that’s the kindest description of it.  I knew better and I was a fool even so.  I am sorry.”

“Then it _is_ mended,” Douglas said.  “I’m satisfied.  Let it be.”

Ahrens drew an easier breath.  “Thank you.  You’re a credit to your mother’s name.”

“I should have you meet my mother someday.”  Douglas didn’t smile, but there was a mischievous light in his eyes.

“As a cure for my ignorance.  Should I be afraid?” Ahrens said, beginning to smile again.

“Very,” Douglas said, and Ahrens laughed outright.  He slapped the table and got up.

“I look forward to it.  Good night, then, Douglas.  Thank you, Speir.”  Ahrens directed a bow and a wave between them both, and went his way.

Douglas watched him go, his face calm, and then turned back to her.  “So, then.  You were going to challenge me to combat with the baton?”

“If you were agreeable,” Speir said.

“I am.”  He gave her a nod.  “Shall I mark it on the schedule for us?”

“Thank you,” she said, and Douglas got up.

“Oh,” he added, “and Glenna wants to switch his night shift at the training-room desk.  Would you be able to give him yours in exchange?”

“When’s his?”

“Tomorrow.”

“I can do that.”

“Thanks.  I’ll rewrite the schedule and tell him.”  He offered her a dry half-grin, and went away.

She would _definitely_ have to observe Douglas closely during training this week.

*

On her way back to her quarters, to put in a few hours’ study before hitting her bunk for the night, she met Barklay coming in from the tower quad.  Barklay was one of those who never put his hood up; he never even troubled to acknowledge being wet, even when, as now, the drops sparkled on the top of his gray-sandy hair and glistened dark on his brows and temples.  “Good evening, Lieutenant,” he said.  “I hope I see you well.”

“Very well, thank you, sir.”

“I see you’re scheduled for a match next week.”  Their ways lay together until she reached the door to the junior officers’ wing, and they fell into step easily.

“Yes, sir; Douglas and I just worked out our format.”

“Oh?  What’s it to be?”

“Batons.”

Barklay gave an amused little snort.  “I see.  Well, don’t let him have it all his own way.”

“I intend not to, sir,” Speir said.

“Very good.”

They were comfortably silent till they reached the place of parting, where Speir stopped and said, “I’ll say good night now, sir.”

Barklay gave a small bow.  “Rest well, Lieutenant.”  Barklay’s courtesy was Ryswyck in apogee: a grace that approached kinship with a mere gesture.  Speir felt comforted.  She put her closed hand to her heart in thanks.

“And you, sir.”  She put her hand to the latch and went out into the cloister, where the rain had intensified to a curtain spilling heavily over the roof and down the eaves.  It was dark, and the lights of the arena sparkled across the quad.

Speir paused between the doorways to listen to the rain and look out upon the lights and windows of her home.  The spring smell was heavy and thick in the air, cool loam and leaves sharply unfurling.  She breathed deeply of the air, and then passed through the door to her wing, to finish her day.

*

Barklay lifted the tea basket out of his cup, let the few streaming drops fall from the bottom, and set it on its stand.  Carrying his tea with him, a delicate cup in a soldier’s hand, he moved slowly to the window behind his desk, turning low the desk lamp on his way so that he could see out.

His spacious office was ranked on the outer wall by tall windows dressed in drapes of sheer white—a shield for privacy that made the most of what daylight was available.  In the low light their radiance was softened to a warm yellow depth beyond which the rain could be heard plashing its way down the stone channels set into the ground for it.  Barklay nudged aside one of the drapes at its edge and sipped at his steaming tea.

From his office windows he had an oblique view of the com tower, and in the other direction, the front gates of RyswyckAcademy.  The lights of the com tower were steady in the rain, and the lamps at the stone gateposts sparkled with the drops on their glass housing.  They had stood for years, for other uses and other Ilonians, and now stood for Ryswyckians of the new generation, and looked to stand for years and generations more.  It was the image of a security that Barklay himself did not feel.

With his eyes on the com tower Barklay reflected on the day’s decision to accept Selkirk’s candidate.  His senior officers had, predictably, taken the same view of the matter as Douglas: a bad idea, preferable only to open hostility with the Lord High Commander.  All of them, even those who were not Ryswyckians themselves, had expressed reservations about what could be a fateful choice, but in the end had pledged to support and train their new colleague with all courtesy.

No further would Barklay allow himself to go to inoculate himself against any attempt to divide him from the loyalty of his students and officers.  He would not have allowed himself to go so far, had not the antipathy emanating from the Council as Selkirk ascended become so obvious.  Someday he was going to have to place Ryswyck in someone else’s hands.  But those hands would be of his choosing.  He would just have to find a way to outlast Selkirk’s enmity till then.  Undefendedness, indeed.

The watch was changing in the com tower: he could see Lieutenant Fia going out with her lantern to relieve her rota colleague.  The water wheel of the life of Ryswyck turned quietly on its axis.

Barklay swallowed the last of his tea, closed the drape on the night, and went to bed.


	3. Chapter 3

Speir got her opportunity to observe Douglas in action during the next training session.  It was the day after a cadet match, so much of the early part of the session was devoted to re-enacting the various moves and blows observed in the arena, and amidst the heat of discussion the officers of A Rota were pointing out the various strategies employed, anatomizing and then synthesizing them for the benefit of the cadets.

When they had beaten the stuffing out of that subject, Douglas looked at his watch.  “Right,” he said, “we’ve time to work only one format before sparring court.  Everyone get a headguard and a foil.”

A few disgruntled noises rose from among the cadets, but they obeyed amiably enough.  Even as Douglas put them through a merciless set of difficult exercises, Speir was surprised to see them continue docile…until she caught sight of Barklay from the corner of her eye, observing with arms crossed from an unobtrusive vantage point.

Barklay’s presence, however, was not enough to inspire the students to a satisfactory performance.  “A good number of us seem to be rusty,” Douglas observed.  “No better day, then, to devote a whole sparring court to the foil.  Get your sparring partner and make your queue.”

This raised an outright protest.  “Ah, no, Lieutenant Douglas—”  “But I’ve an open-hand match next week—” and most audibly, “Not a _whole day_ of foils—”

Douglas listened unmoved, waiting for his charges to reconcile themselves to the inevitable; but Barklay heaved an aggrieved sigh from the sidelines, and the murmur died altogether.

“The poor maligned foil,” he said.  “What will become of this generation?  You are missing the beauties of the format.”  He stepped through the students and over to the rack; chose a foil, tested its ball-tipped point against the floor, then slid it back in and chose another, with great deliberation.

“It may help you,” Barklay went on, “to envision the foil as an elegant version of a combat knife.  It is every bit as deadly in its way as a closed fist or a bit of wood.  And since every woman and man in the Ilonian military is issued a combat knife, you actually stand some chance of needing it, when projectiles fail.  Which is why I insist on Ryswyckians knowing the principles of its use.”  Barklay found a foil to his liking and whipped it briefly through the air.  The unsharp blade made a fine whistle, but Barklay was right: in his hand, it did look like a combat knife.

“Perhaps it would be as well to give a demonstration.”  Barklay had everybody’s undivided attention; cadets and junior officers alike had gathered around in interest.  As they all watched, Barklay put down the foil and began to undo his tunic.  He shrugged out of it and laid it neatly over the top of the rack, then removed his cravat and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt over strong forearms.  As he was levering off his shoes, he looked up: his eyes scanned the gathering and lit on Douglas.

“Lieutenant Douglas,” he said, “you are handy with a foil, are you not?”

“Yes, sir,” Douglas said, with a resigned dryness that made several people smile.  Obediently he stepped into the clear space made by the crowd and lifted a hand to catch a foil tossed to him grip-first.  In Douglas’s hand, the foil looked like a small one-handed baton.  Her interest further sharpened, Speir edged from behind the shoulder of a tall cadet to improve her view.

“The first principle, as always,” Barklay said, “is to know whom you are facing.”  He bowed to Douglas, who returned the courtesy.  “And the second principle,” he added with the hint of a grin, “is to keep facing them.  Lieutenant, I beg you will be merciful to an old man out of practice.”

“Certainly I would, sir,” Douglas said, “if I were fighting one.”  He raised the point of his foil, waiting.  Barklay gave it a light slap with the blade of his, and the round began.

Douglas at first made no advance, merely kept his foil at guard and shifted his position in mirror to Barklay’s incremental movements.  Speir didn’t think Barklay could be drawn into a rash attack: she waited to see how this strategy would play out.

For a moment Barklay was marble still.  Then he lashed out in three blows, two high and one low, which Douglas in his concentration parried easily: the sound and velocity together were like thunderclaps.  Douglas riposted, and Barklay turned aside his point with a controlled vehemence.  And Douglas was drawn finally into attack mode.

The edges of the gathered watchers shifted, elastic to the movements of the combatants, as Douglas and Barklay began circling one another, looking for an opening.  Attack was vulnerability, Speir knew; it was in defense that she often had her best successes, and in attack that she had learned to measure risk.  She tried to think Douglas’s thoughts for him as she watched him form his strategy.

Barklay was quick, too quick for a brutal assault without masked intent.  One could win a point from him by slipping inside his guard during a heated exchange, but that involved standing up to the exchange itself.  Barklay was clearly trying to draw Douglas out, probably to display his strengths as well as expose his weaknesses; Speir hadn’t forgotten this was a teaching exercise.

Sure enough, there followed a series of exchanged blows which the onlookers could hardly follow: and then Douglas, whose motions had described the plane of baton work, suddenly shifted to the line of a hard thrust.  Barklay eluded the point by an atom’s width, threw Douglas’s following stroke aside, and backed up grinning.

Someone less experienced would have been provoked into rushing Barklay: Douglas fell back to guard position, caught his breath, and waited for another opening.  Speir could see his eyes reading Barklay and the air around him; and just as Douglas returned his gaze to Barklay’s face, Barklay attacked.

It was the kind of onslaught one rarely saw even in the arena: blows so controlled and whole-body vigorous they were like open-hand blows with a long knife and not foil-strokes at all.  One suddenly remembered that Barklay had seen real combat; that what they were training for involved far more contingency than an arbitrary fault.

Douglas met the attack like a rock lashed by a wave of the sea; only the muscles standing out like cords in his neck betrayed the concentration it took to keep up his defense.  Even so, in the next moment a foil went flying, scattering the circle where it landed with a ringing clatter to the floor, and it was Douglas’s.

But before Barklay could win the round with his next stroke, Douglas ducked the point, hit Barklay’s wrist with his hand, and escaped to retrieve his foil.  He came up with it in his hand, back at guard, breathing quickly, and offered Barklay a little head tilt as much as to say, _You’ll have to be faster than that_.

Barklay responded with a narrow feline smile.

When they met again, Barklay attacked with a sedate precision, and drew Douglas into displaying with him all the moves the section had just practiced, as neat and academic as a training diagram.  Then he varied them, faster.  Then he varied them again, faster still.  The variations grew to a speeding pattern; any moment Speir expected Barklay would break it.

He did—and though Douglas could see the strategy, his defense was hasty.  With a neat twist Barklay disarmed him again, and in the same motion forestalled Douglas’s escape with the ball-tipped point of the foil thrust against his solar plexus.  As his foil rattled to silence, Douglas brought his empty hands palm up in a gesture of triumphant surrender: his chin up, his eyes—his whole being—fixed on Barklay in a concentration that was not fear, but was akin to fear in its total absorption with its object.

The whole room was perfectly still along with them.  Then Barklay withdrew his point and both men breathed in; and Speir caught her own breath.

Empty-handed, Douglas saluted Barklay sharply.  In return, Barklay shifted his foil to the other hand and bowed with closed hand over heart.  On cadets, the gesture looked acquired, on junior and senior officers comfortable: Barklay made it look as natural as breath itself.

“Well,” Barklay said into the silence, “I think that will do.  Carry on.”

He put away his foil with an air of quiet satisfaction, slipped back into his shoes, tucked his tunic and cravat over his arm, and walked out of the still-silent crowd.  Only the dampness at his temples and the warmth of his passage suggested he had undergone any exertion.

If that was the end of the match, then they had got their salutes exactly backwards.  Yet Speir had a feeling that Douglas had had a private point of his own to make.  And that he’d succeeded.  She looked back at him where he stood; his mouth was closed but he was still visibly catching his breath.  As she watched, Douglas took out his watch and noted the time.

“Time enough for three one-round matches per circle,” he said, as if nothing had happened.  “Take your places.”

They went, without a feather-breath of protest.

*

The impromptu match between Douglas and Barklay was the talk of the Academy for the rest of the day.  Some of the cadets found a new appreciation for the foils format, though one said in Speir’s hearing, “Barklay can make bell-ringing look exciting,” and Speir could not but agree.

She went to get her shower with her thoughts half in the future, planning strategy for next week’s match.  Douglas’s control was almost wholly impeccable; he would be hard to draw.  But maybe she could get the chance to initiate a pattern and break it.  It would have to be subtle, or he would guess her strategy and block it.  And for defense she would need all the speed of her reflexes: a few turns with a baton and the randomized light-target station wouldn’t go amiss.

“Speir? Speir!”

Speir blinked.  She was walking down the junior-officer wing corridor to supper, and Cameron was matching step beside her.

“Lost in the far reaches, were you?” Cameron said, grinning.

“Planning strategy for my match next week,” Speir answered amiably.

“So long as you don’t walk smack into a wall doing it.  Put yourself out of commission before you ever saw the arena.”  Speir snorted, and Cameron went on, “I’d be planning too, if I were up against Douglas.  I heard he and Barklay put on quite the show this afternoon.”

“They did indeed,” Speir said, pushing open the door to take the cloister shortcut and holding open the door for Cameron to follow.  “Gave me a great deal of food for thought.”

“I bet,” Cameron said dryly.

“You ever see Barklay fight?” Speir asked her.

“No; I missed that privilege.  But they say he used to teach all the training modules himself, till the tradition was established.  I bet that was fun.”

“Or painful.”

“Or both.”

“Have you ever faced Douglas in the arena?  I can’t remember.”

“He beat me soundly when we were first-year cadets.  But then I beat Adair, who beat him, so that’s all right.”  Cameron grinned cheerfully.

“How did Adair beat Douglas?” Speir had a vague memory of that match last year; open-hand, she thought it had been.

“Outlasted him,” Cameron said.  “Punch-drunk him under the table, as it were.”

“Mm,” Speir said.  “Less easy to pull off with a baton, but I’ll keep it in mind.”

“You could ask him to switch to foils,” Cameron said, wickedly.

“Ha.  You didn’t see him against Barklay.  That was a work of art I wouldn’t attempt to duplicate.”  Speir indulged in a little shudder of admiration.  “It was remarkably compelling, the two of them.”

“Little wonder,” Cameron said.  “He’s one of Barklay’s particulars, you know.”

Speir frowned at her.  “I didn’t think Barklay had any favorites.”

“He doesn’t,” Cameron said, significantly.

It took several steps nearer to the door at the end of the cloister before Speir figured out what she meant.  “Huh,” she said, finally.  “I thought that was just one of those rumors put about to impress the cadets.”

“Well, there certainly are a lot of those,” Cameron said.  “Just the other day Andera was asking me if it was true that we hold all our junior officer meetings in the nude.”

“And you told him, ‘Of course,’” Speir grinned.  “We also grease each other up and hold a wrestling tournament.  First prize is the minute-book.”

“Oh, you gave it away with the minute-book.  Nobody would believe _that_.”  Cameron pulled open the heavy door, and they went inside laughing.

*

Douglas heaved the barn door closed, and it rolled to with a lumbering clack.  He dusted off his hands and turned to walk with Stevens back up the hill to the school.

“Thanks for helping me shift the hay,” Stevens said.  “I know you’re busy, but I wanted someone who knows what they’re doing.”

“It’s my pleasure,” Douglas said, and added with half a grin, “Feels like home.  How’s the farm this week?”

Ryswyck farm was run by a stakeholder family in the usual way, but the farm’s produce largely went to the Academy, in exchange for a little student labor and a government stipend.  The students were responsible for upkeep of the stables, and for managing the supply requisitions, practice for military duties in the future.

Stevens shrugged.  “Doing well, I think.  They’re looking forward to a good summer.  Least one decent cutting of hay, they hope.”

Douglas nodded, and glanced up at the sky.  A ragged mist was chasing itself across the near depths overhead, lit in places where the sun’s lowering glow stained the western side with bright silver.  A week or two more of such evenings, and they’d soon be able to see blue.  At home, the ice on the Bay would have broken up and the fishers would be out.  His mother was probably hip-deep in lambs and trimming orchards of their ice breakage.

Stevens said:  “So what was that I heard in the corridor about you and Barklay dusting it up with foils?”

Douglas answered with a little sigh.  “Barklay hates it when people complain about working foils.  He decided to give a little demonstration for an example.”

“Did he put you on the floor?” Stevens asked, half sympathetic and half gleeful.

“To speak of miracles,” Douglas said, “no.”  He rubbed his solar plexus thoughtfully.  “No cost to my dignity, fortunately.  It was a very effective demonstration.”

“Evidently.”  And what Stevens didn’t know about the incident now, he would know by this time tomorrow.  Stevens was a connoisseur of gossip; he could roll a rumor around on his tongue and divine its vintage to very fine distinction.  Stevens was, fortunately, also very discriminating in what he passed along.  Douglas knew that he and Barklay figured in plenty of the school’s rumors; it was easy enough to resign himself, so long as nobody broke the taboo against asking him about it.

Sure enough, Stevens only added:  “In any case, better you than me.  I’m no good at all with a foil.  Barklay’d have minced me like an onion.”

This was not strictly true; nobody had ever challenged Stevens to foils in a match with a view to actually claiming a victory—but then, most Ryswyckians preferred the highest possible challenge when given their choice.

A light rain began to fall as they reached the outer door to the cloister.  Stevens quickened his pace, more out of habit than anxiety over getting wet, and Douglas followed him; but their momentum was stopped in the doorway by Turnbull waiting in their path.

“So there are two fellows in a belltower in the dead of night,” he said without preamble, “and one of them says to the other, ‘It’s your turn to pull the rope,’ so he reaches out and starts hauling away, but the other fellow starts to cry out. ‘What’s wrong?’ the bellringer says, and the other says, ‘You’ve got the wrong end!’”

Turnbull stopped to judge their reaction to this sally, and a crestfallen look took over his face when Stevens and Douglas glanced at one another without laughing.  “No good?” he said anxiously.

Douglas searched for something constructive to say. 

Stevens said kindly, “It’s better than the last one.”

“Damn it!” Turnbull said, and whirled away.

Douglas and Stevens continued into the cloister, toward the mess hall.

“He’ll get there eventually,” Stevens said, with a very serious face.

“I think he’s yanking on the wrong end, myself,” Douglas said, and they both finally cracked up.

They parted in the corridor to their respective quarters, to wash before supper.  Douglas showered quickly and turned up his desk lamp so he could read his messages while he dressed.  There were no surprises.  Glenna wanted to change his schedule again.  Per Marag, the signature ceremony for next week’s matches would be tomorrow at breakfast.  He had a parcel in the mail room from his sister Em.  Barklay wanted to see him, either before supper or after it, whichever was convenient.

No, no surprises.  Douglas buttoned his tunic with care, considered and discarded the idea of skipping supper altogether, and shut down the lamp.

*

It was full dark when he arrived at Barklay’s office after supper: the only light in the room was the one at his desk, magnified to a buttery glow by the drapes behind.  Barklay was going over score sheets with a stylus in his hand; he looked up, and Douglas noted without surprise a lingering trace of the look of feline intent that had riveted them all that afternoon.

“Undefendedness,” Barklay said, expectantly.

Douglas shut the door behind him without being asked.

“Ryswyckians understand it, sir,” Douglas said, with a patience he did not feel.  “But can it be made intelligible to people outside?”

“If it can’t,” Barklay said, “then what are we doing here?”

Douglas shook his head, searching for words to name the problem with sanitizing detachment.

“It’s the next thing to do, you know,” Barklay said.  “Making what we do here translatable to the rest of Ilona.  And beyond that, too.”

Barklay could be so frustrating.  Of course that was not what Douglas was talking about, and Barklay knew it.

“It’s why I agreed years ago to bring in instructors from outside,” Barklay went on.  “They seem to pick up the culture well enough.”

“And if they come in hostile, and willfully ready to misunderstand?” Douglas’s voice was calm, but there must have been a note in it that made Barklay look up sharply.

A little silence fell, in which their eyes met.  “Are you worried about exposure?” Barklay said finally.

Memory of the afternoon’s exhibition flashed before his mind’s eye.  “It’s a little late for that,” he said dryly.

“Quite.”  Barklay looked amused.  “But if you’re concerned about the more private traditions—”

“That’s just it, sir,” Douglas said.  “There is no privacy here.  Only discretion.”  Barklay opened his mouth, but Douglas got the argument out in a rush.  “ _All_ of what we do here is by mutual consent.  The use of deadly force in the arena for practice combat—the forms of courtesy—the ways we oblige one another—none of that is a burden because it is something we all share.  I’m not saying we shouldn’t risk sharing it with someone who might throw the burden back on us…or on some one of us—I’m saying—”

But the force of Douglas’s passion had outrun his ability to articulate it, and he finally shook his head in frustration.

“You’re saying,” Barklay said gently, “that I should calculate that risk.”

Douglas looked at him silently, and sighed.

“‘Some one of us,’” Barklay repeated.  “It’s not yourself you are worried about, then.”

“It’s not myself that Lord Selkirk doesn’t like, sir.”

“Indeed.”  Barklay stirred the papers on his desk for a moment, a somber unreadable look in his face.  After a moment he looked up again.  “Douglas…in case you are ever presented with the temptation…please don’t lie for me.  If you love me.”

“Noted, sir,” Douglas said, stiffly.  _If_ , indeed.

“I have taken your counsel under advisement.”  Barklay’s voice was even more gentle.  “But do keep in mind: to offer courtesy only when there’s a chance of its return is exactly the opposite of courtesy’s intent.”

_You’ve got the wrong end_.  Douglas’s lips twitched into an involuntary half-smile.  “Yes, sir.  You are quite right, sir.”

Barklay put his papers and stylus aside, and looked up into Douglas’s face.  Douglas stood calm and braced.

“Speaking of obliging one another,” he said, after a silence, “it’s been a little while since I asked a favor of you.”

“Yes, sir,” Douglas said, and inwardly relaxed.  He always tensed in anticipation of this moment, and always when it came the tension released.  In the next moment Barklay would either stand up or lean back in his chair, and he would know which sort of favor Barklay wanted.

Barklay rose, and came round the desk, beyond the light, to where Douglas stood by the conference table.

“Will you oblige me this evening?” Barklay asked him softly.

“Yes, sir,” Douglas said, and he turned to brace his hands on the smooth shining surface of the table.

*

Delayed by an early glut of dispatches from the com tower requiring his immediate attention, Barklay arrived in the mess hall to find a plurality of the students finished with their breakfast and waiting restlessly for the assembly to start.  Some of them were visiting with others at other tables, while a few were making curious passes at the table set out with the release forms for the upcoming matches.  A junior officer noticed his arrival and reached for the nearby bell hanging by the door; at its chime the chaos dislimned and everyone stood to attention.

Barklay waved them down, and went to collect his bowl of farina and a cup of strong tea.  He found a seat on a bench next to Captain Marag, who had pushed aside his empty bowl and was answering a question from Lieutenant Fia about the upcoming general exam.  When Fia had gone back to her table, Marag glanced companionably at his superior.

“All right, sir?”

“Fine,” Barklay said.  “Busy morning, already.”

“Yes, sir.”

For the third time Barklay saw a cadet pass curiously by the signature table and slow long enough to glance at the papers.  “Marag,” Barklay said, “do you think our traditions are translatable to the outside world?”

Marag wasn’t the ideal person to ask this question—he’d been lead instructor for a few years now and his exposure to the outside world was limited to the tac department at Amity Base—but he was sensible and possessed a pliant, resilient sense of humor.  As Barklay watched, Marag paused with his cup in midair to think before answering.

“The courtesy behind them, may be.  I hope so,” he said.  “The traditions themselves, I would say are variable by necessity.  They look different to me now than when I was a cadet—and I don’t think it’s just the distance of age.  I think they shape themselves to the generation.”

As with the current aversion to foils, Marag didn’t say, but his glance seemed to imply that Barklay’s intervention in yesterday’s sparring court was on his mind.

“A Berenian Ryswyck, then,” Barklay pursued, “you think would operate differently.”

Marag looked startled.  “Undoubtedly, sir,” he said, after a moment.

“Mm,” Barklay said, and left it at that.

“Ready for the assembly, sir?” Marag asked him.

“Yes, go on.”  As Barklay snatched a few last bites of farina, Marag downed the last of his tea and stood up.

The release-form signing ceremony was a weekly staple of breakfast at Ryswyck, and was usually very short and simple, but it was imbued with the expectation of the future match it represented, and so the student body took a keener interest than the signing of papers seemed to warrant.  After the orison and the announcements, everyone’s eyes turned to the table.

Marag called the four cadets and two junior officers by their full formal names, and they came to stand to either side of the table.  Barklay let his gaze rest briefly on Douglas as he got to his feet.  Douglas, with his quiet intelligent authority and passionate equilibrium, had a quality that surpassed even the most talented junior officers who had been special to Barklay over the years—but there was no real means of comparison, Barklay reminded himself, just the potential one carried and the circumstances one found oneself in.

He was up against a formidable opponent this week; Speir was a dedicated fighter and no doubt would put Douglas’s skill with the baton to a memorable test.  Barklay, keenly observant of all his students, knew that she was shaping well and looked forward to seeing what she would do against her rota leader.

Marag began the ceremony by reading aloud the common provisions of the release: that each combatant would engage his or her opponent in the arena in the agreed format, that they would each abide by the law of courtesy and the conventions of the arena during combat, that they would accept the judgments applied by the senior official and anyone assisting that official, and that in the event of their incapacitation or death they would allow the Academy to activate their personal directives on file and inform their next-of-kin where appropriate.

Barklay, observing from behind the table, invited the students to review their own release forms for accuracy before signing them.  They all bent intently over the pages, and Barklay amused himself with the thought of what must be the assembly’s view of their comrades’ asses pointed their direction.  No one joked, however, not even Lieutenant Turnbull.  Barklay sometimes wondered if the seriousness with which they all regarded the arena ought to be leavened a bit.  After all—

“Hm,” Speir said.  “I think I had better go ahead and change the terms of my directive.”

The others looked at her curiously, but Speir looked up only at Barklay and Marag.  “I think I’ve still got my father listed as the executor.  I need to give that task to his cousin.”

He had known Speir’s father was ill, but had not been aware his condition had deteriorated so far.  “I’m sorry to hear that, Lieutenant,” Barklay said, and Speir offered him a sad little smile.  “Marag, why don’t you go with Speir to the archive room after this, and help her arrange the alterations.”

Marag nodded.

“Not that I’ve much to execute in the event of my death,” Speir said cheerfully.  “Just our flat in the capital and a little savings to donate.”

Cadet Grant looked up from her own form with an uneasy frown.  “But nobody’s ever actually died in the arena, have they?”

“Oh yes,” Marag said.  “It did happen once.  I was a cadet at the time.  A junior officer got his neck broken in an open-hand match.”

“Oh,” Grant said, with an attempt at nonchalance.

Douglas asked, “What happened to the survivor?”

Marag shrugged.  “He got over it best he could.  He’s serving in supply management between Amity and the capital, now.”

A very succinct way of putting it.  Barklay remembered that year vividly: how Lieutenant Payton had wept inconsolably at the memorial rite, the sound mixing in the rain with the sound of the carillon’s dirge.  How the junior officers had drawn around him as one, comforting and cajoling and finally attempting to force him back into sparring practice.  How Barklay had entered and sat down at the next junior officer meeting, and the silence that had settled like a palpable thing over them all.

“Please allow me to note,” he had said to Payton, who sat apart, sullen and congealed in his grief, “that your fellow officers are right to want you to get up and go on again as much as you can.  Resist them if you must, but do remember they have a point.”  He turned to the others.  “And the rest of you must remember that Payton is right to grieve as much as he wants.  You are not here to learn how to avoid grieving.”  His eye gathered them all in.  “The day you can weep for your enemy as Payton weeps for his friend, is the day my work is perfected.”  In the stunned silence that followed, he had risen and gone away.

Payton had carried his point; he finished his term as a junior officer but he never set foot in the arena complex again.  And the student body of that year had gone on to produce some of Ryswyck’s most decorated, balanced, and celebrated alumni, Marag being only one example.

Barklay had often wished he could think of a way to teach every crop of Ryswyckians the same lesson without any actual loss of life.

Marag collected the signed papers.  The combatants saluted him and Barklay sharply; Marag dismissed the assembly, and he and Speir began to wend their way out through the chaos that erupted.  Barklay turned back to his place at the bench, to find that someone had thoughtfully collected his bowl and mug for him already.

He returned his gaze to the exodus of Ryswyckians.  Their laughter and chatter echoed among the rafters of the hall, diminishing as they exited.  The carillon in the tower sounded its call to classes.

_Oh, my children_ , Barklay thought.

*

“Douglas,” Marag said— “a word, please.”

Douglas paused in the corridor and allowed Marag to draw him into the classroom where he taught supply management.  The projection was still up with a schematic of GT lines for a dummy fort; Marag passed through it and retrieved a packet from his desk.

“If you would review these and distribute them to those in your section who are participating in the service course, it would save me a step and I’d be grateful.”

Douglas accepted the packet and leafed briefly through it.  “Certainly.”

“The service course is still a few weeks away, so you may want to hold onto them for a few days, but I thought I’d give you the option of distributing them before your match.”

Douglas gave him a lopsided grin.  “All this talk of death and dismemberment making you nervous, sir?”

“It pays to be circumspect,” was Marag’s dry response.

“Right.”  Douglas paused.  “I…didn’t know Speir’s father had died.”

“He hasn’t,” Marag said grimly.  “He has one of the degenerative nerve disorders, Kilragh’s or Adelhaer’s, I can’t remember which one.  It’s progressed to the palliative stage now, I understand, but he has veteran’s benefits, so he’s being well taken care of.”

Worse, then.  “I’m sorry to hear,” Douglas murmured.  “She hasn’t any other close family—siblings?  Her mother—”

“Commanded the _Beatrix_ fighting off the last invasion attempt.  Lost with all souls at the bottom of the strait.  I don’t think Speir has any siblings.”

Douglas had often envied only children their untrammeled solitude, but this was one case where envy was out of place.  He thought of his own mother, living, breathing, and vigorous, and tried to imagine a life in which one’s mother was only an honored memory.  He shook his head.

“I wouldn’t carry that pity into the arena with me, if I were you,” Marag warned him.  “Speir’s no pushover.”

“You think I’m not aware?” Douglas grinned again.  “She’s in my rota, you know.”

Marag smiled wryly back, but grew pensive again almost at once.  “Her parents were navy,” he mused, “but she went army.  Never even hesitated.”

“No mystery in that,” Douglas said. 

Marag was a navy man, so maybe it did seem odd to him.  He raised an eyebrow, waiting for the rest.

“Not much open-hand in the navy,” Douglas said, and a real smile sprang to Marag’s face.  Just then the bells rang for the next class block, and Douglas backed out of Marag’s room to stay ahead of the rush.  “See you at sparring court, sir.”

Douglas went down to his quarters to change and see if he could wedge open a spot on his schedule for personal training.  One planned strategy was manifestly not going to be enough.

*

In the quiet dimness, Speir wrapped her wrists in tape with quick, practiced motions, then fitted on her headguard and fastened the clip.  She was alone in the small changing room: the tradition was that the combatants entered the combat pit from opposite ends and left together.

She shrugged out of her changing robe; the skin left bare by her singlet prickled in the cool air.  White singlet, black loose knit pants, soft-grip training slippers (which usually filled with prickly sawdust by the end of a match despite the tight elastic).  Her baton waited, leaning against the wall.

Above her head, footsteps rumbled as the student body found seats in the ranked stalls; she could hear the excited thread of their voices, anticipating the spectacle.  Almost time.

The sounds above changed; Speir didn’t hear the call to attention, but she heard the unified scrape of the students rising to their feet and the sudden silence before the chant began.  She got up from the bench, took her baton, and took a parade-rest stance at the door to the combat pit.  Her fingers curled around the smooth treated wood in a comfortable grip born of long use.

She closed her eyes and breathed in, and then out, in offering.

The latch clanked heavily, and the door opened.  Speir opened her eyes to the bright vividness of the combat pit, and stepped forth.

Across from her, Douglas was coming out of the other changing room, dressed identically and carrying his own baton.  Already the long staff looked like an organic extension of Douglas’s own reach.  They stopped across from one another at the center mark and bowed formally, closed hand over heart; then as one they turned, stood to attention, and snapped a salute to where Barklay sat on the headmaster’s platform.  Barklay rose and saluted them back.

From the judge’s perch, Marag said:  “Is all well?”

“Yes, sir,” Douglas said, and Speir gave him a sharp nod.

“Then begin.”  His whistle chirped, and the silence of the crowd began to break up in murmurs and calls.

Speir hardly heard them.  Her whole living attention was driven into engagement with the approach of her opponent.  She had watched Douglas in action before, and knew him to be a neat and graceful fighter: but that had been a side-on view, as it were.  Now, he was coming for her, and before her eyes his habitual calm opened as a calyx to reveal a bright, controlled intensity before their batons had even touched.  Her spirits rose in response.

They circled and tried a few passes, making contact once and then again; she had known he wouldn’t rush her, and would try to draw her before bringing his full energy to bear.  She could give him what he wanted, and bring them to full engagement, but it would probably cost her a point or even the round.  Very expensive, but worth it perhaps, if he was lulled into complacency by it.  Without further hesitation, she attacked.

He eluded her, so neatly that for a split second she lost him altogether, and if it hadn’t been for her instinct to ground her baton one-handed behind her, he’d have had her feet from under her in the next split second.  As it was, his blow jarred all along her baton and almost dislodged it from its plant in the sawdust; she snatched it back to a two-handed grip and whirled to ward off his next blow, skipping back two steps to give herself room.

But he kept coming.  Her next moves were all by lightning defensive instinct; three, four blows she blocked before getting her feet planted to resume her offense.  She got her center of gravity under his and threw him back a length with a horizontal thrust—the shouts from the crowd above rose in a roar—and lunged with the point of the baton right after, which he ducked just in time.

Right, better keep attacking.  He planted his feet in turn and blocked two of her blows; the third grazed his shoulder before he could swing under the protection of his own baton, but he ignored the damage and wrested free of the engagement, his eyes bright in what she suspected was Douglas’s version of Stevens’s battle-grin.

Sensing a chance to win the round, Speir angled forward to aim a hard blow.

And found herself falling in a heavy impact that shook the ground and her with it, her baton torn from her hands.  Weak sunlight from the dome lit the drifting sawdust—and then in the foreground, the business end of a baton heading at speed straight for her face.

She rolled, barely ahead of the blow, and then rolled again, and angled another roll to twist her feet in Douglas’s and bring him down.  She scrambled up, shedding sawdust, and located her baton where it lay; by the time Douglas was up she had it again and was catching her breath.

Sawdust stuck all over to the sweat on her skin; the scratch on Douglas’s shoulder was similarly coated.

By tacit mutual consent they took a few seconds to regain their breath; and then his eyes narrowed with intent, and he attacked.  His blow against her block jarred her whole frame and rattled her vision, but it did nothing to shake the joyful abandon singing through her pulses.  She threw him off, curveted out of his range, and sailed back into offense with velocity, aiming under cover of feint for his wounded shoulder.

This time she was thrown so far she skidded a furrow in the sawdust.  She just managed to keep hold of her baton by one hand and dragged it back fast as a bar to his following stroke—and the whistle screamed.  Douglas halted his momentum toward her, lowered his baton, and fell back to the mark.

Marag waited until Speir was on her feet before calling out:  “Second throw.  Round to Douglas.”

Speir scarcely heard the judgment.  “How did you do that?” she demanded of Douglas in consternation.

He stood leaning on his baton, and his eyes were laughing.  “You have a tell when you feint,” he said.

_Oh do I?  Well, time and past time to put an end to_ that.

Douglas read her thoughts.  “I dare you to find it by the end of the match.”

“Don’t worry,” she said coolly.

“Do I look worried?”

He didn’t.  Speir was charged to the fingertips with a mixture of fury and delight.  She brought her hand up and saluted him with a flourish as hard as a blow.  He received it with a graceful bow, no less pointed.

Marag watched to be sure they were ready, and opened the next round with his whistle.

The first round had taken the edge off their energy.  For a few passes they merely circled one another, reading one another’s motions and the very air all around them.  Finally, with an air of experiment, Douglas advanced to attack.

She parried each blow without trouble, working in a riposte when she could, which he blocked just as easily.  In another moment he was going to dial up the intensity without warning, and Speir used the seconds of respite left to think furiously over her method of feinting.

She had made it a point of pride not to rely too much on one lead, either with a baton or in an open-hand contest, and the proof lay in how many opponents she had been able to take by surprise.  So the tell probably wasn’t in the lead.  Likewise with the direction of her gaze: she may have glanced once too many at Douglas’s bloodied shoulder, but he had clearly come into this match with knowledge gathered from observing her in the sparring court.

Perhaps it was in the pattern of her blows—

As she’d anticipated, Douglas suddenly intensified his attack, in a sharp downward cut designed to exploit their height difference.  With satisfaction Speir responded by needling her own baton between his arms and breaking the trajectory of his blow.  His grip was too strong for her to tear his baton away altogether, but she spun and got away clean, and the crowd shouted appreciation.

She rejoined the attack in her own burst of intensity, varying everything without pause or quarter, and actually drove him back several steps.  He finally got a foot planted and riposted, but the position of her grip had placed her perfectly for a strike at his balance.  Arching away from the point of his blow, she drove for his other shoulder and scored a direct hit, forcing him to step back to his planted foot.  Still she did not hesitate; even as she measured the risk, the moment was in the past, and her baton was between his feet, and he was down.

The arena was ringing with shouts and stamping of feet.  Douglas blocked her following stroke one-handed and rolled quickly back to his feet, but she kept coming, changing leads, giving him no chance to read her.  He got briefly clear and raised his baton for a blow, but she plowed right into him with a bar-thrust against his breastbone.  He dropped, and the whistle shrieked.

Speir backed up to the mark.  Douglas struggled upright, bent over again wheezing, and finally came back to his own mark, in time to hear Marag call the round for Speir.

“Did I fix it?” she asked him.

“You fixed something,” he said.  There was a glint of pleasure in his eye, and she grinned back.  He saluted her smartly; she bowed.

The whistle blew for the third round.  This time both of them came at each other in determined velocity.  Blow after blow after blow, and Speir’s teeth started to hurt from the jarring impacts of baton on baton.  She had better try to finish this quickly, if she hoped to win the match.

As she dashed forward to duck under his guard, she saw the moment when he read her intent, but it was too late to change course or ground her baton against his defensive attack.  He swung his baton two-handed from one end; it slammed into her arm below the shoulder, and the treated wood broke cleanly in two, a visible mirror to the shock of pain that cut through her.  The whole arena drew a loud breath and then went silent.

Leaning one-handed on her baton, Speir firmed her knees and kept standing; but now her left arm hung useless, numbness and pain radiating out from it like cold and heat together.  She looked across at Douglas, who stood before her empty-handed, watching her closely.

“I see it,” she said, and was pleased to hear her own voice come clear and unstrained.  “I’ve been dropping my shoulder on approach, haven’t I?”

He smiled suddenly.

“I am much obliged,” Speir said.

“Not at all.”  He sketched her a small bow with his head.  “Do you concede?”

“Hell, no,” she said.

His smile flashed to a grin and then sobered.  “I’ll hurt you,” he warned her.

She shrugged her good shoulder.  “All’s well.  Go on.”

“Very well.”  He nodded to her, and to Marag, who was waiting with his whistle on his lips, and turned to catch a fresh baton the attendant tossed over the side of the combat pit.  Douglas tossed him back the pieces of the broken one, and though the round hadn’t ended, paced back to his mark to give Speir a moment to gather herself.

Her arm was either broken or the bone was bruised so badly the muscles had locked around it.  She thought possibly the latter, because she could move it just enough to tuck against her side in a faint flexed curl.  She shifted her one-handed grip on the baton up and down, thankful for the tape on the center grip and across her palm that gave her purchase against the sweat.

True to tradition, Douglas did not go easy when she returned to the attack.  The muscles in Speir’s wrist strained to maintain the one-hand grip in what quickly became a set of defensive maneuvers.  Forced to dance between his blows, she made him dance too as she aimed, once and then again, between his feet before darting clear.  The crowd was on its feet in a mounting roar of cheers as the play continued.

She had an opportunity to feint, and could feel the physical habit Douglas had noticed tugging at her muscles.  Oh yes, it was time that was corrected.  Instead of following through, she danced backward again and blocked first a high and then a low thrust.  As she did so, her eye encountered his: and the world was newly revealed.

Speir was well familiar with the buoyant joy of courtesy in combat; every Ryswyckian had some acquaintance with what it meant to give oneself wholly, in the bow of the head and the blow of the fist.  But till this moment she had experienced it as a reality in which they all severally participated, each in their own inherent bubble of acquaintance with the ideal.

But now there was no bubble: there was the wide sacred compass around them, and a single inherence, and Douglas was in it with her.  They fought in a mutuality so absolute that the air around them seemed to shimmer with it.  Yes, this—this was what was meant—something already finished, already accomplished between them forever, and now remained only to be lived out in Douglas’s half-smile of guarded mischief, of the cries of their comrades from overhead, and further up, above the air of the dome, the sparkle of the free-broken spring sun.

They whirled together, describing the compass rose in their joyful fury, and then his baton snaked within her guard, and disarmed her.  In the next moment she was whisked off her feet, and found herself looking up once more through a drift of sawdust, the point of Douglas’s baton riding her solar plexus as she heaved for breath.

“Now?” he said, as if they had been enjoying this argument since childhood.

Speir was trembling with exhaustion, and every inch of her hurt.  She laughed.  “All right,” she said, and brought up her good hand to salute him from the ground.  The whistle shrilled, and Speir’s eardrums crackled with the deafening cataract of shouts from Ryswyck all around.  She couldn’t hear Douglas laugh in return, but she could see his eyes crinkle wearily as he reached down to pull her up.  It took a few moments and a good portion of his strength to get her upright and stable; when she stood on her own, he stepped back and saluted her with the utmost crisp generosity.

She thanked him with closed hand to heart.  They turned, amid the whistling and applause, to salute Barklay once more; even at this distance she could see that Barklay’s eyes were lit.

Douglas picked up both their batons and hefted them lightly on his shoulder.  He looked round for her, and they went together out of the combat pit, into a universe different from the one Speir left when she came into the arena.

For now she had a friend.


End file.
